Broken Isle
by Pascal in Quebec
Summary: ELF! Damaged! Sociopath! Lucas - magic & psionics - Season 1, after Shraeder; the fallout of the inquiries while above the Tonga Trench lead to Lucas plus many others to get set adrift on the ocean during a storm. They discover an isolated peninsula split between an orphanage, a prison, and sanatorium that were run by a british occult sect plus US navy base abandoned after WW II.
1. Chapter 1

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read his story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.

 **Disclaimer:** I do not own SeaQuest, Star Wars, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators or broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

 **SeaQuest**

 **ABSTRACT**

This story takes place in season 1, just after the SeaQuest was violently boarded and taken over by Colonel Shraeder and his mercenaries. I will be modifying several elements of that episode to fit with the fic, notably that there were more mercs in the transport, they were more violent and Lucas had been significantly more reactive and aggressive when helping to safeguard the ship and crew. The modifications to the canon of many episodes will be major and showed as such, in flashbacks or during discussion between crew members.

 **IMPORTANT:** for the purpose of keeping this story logical and relevant, the episode "Nothing but the truth" where Shraeder invades the ship is set as #2 in the season instead of playing at #14 as original. I then follow it immediately by the "Treasures of the Tonga Trench" as #3 instead of playing #5 in the season since I need the inspection to happen quicker to set up stuff quickly and again, logically in time and space. The episode "Bad water" where Lucas, Ford, Krieg and Westphalen are adrift in a life-raft is moved to #4 and then the rest goes weird from there...

This story is Alternate Universe, several characters are OOC and there are several crossovers with many of the maritime-inspired themes and mythos. Like my other story " _Justice for Lucas_ " this has a lot of psionics, magicks _et al_ as such things were part  & parcel of the SeaQuest canon in all three seasons. There won't be any temporal mechanics & bypasses in this story.

PS; I like flames, they're fun to read so don't hesitate to write them.

 **WARNING** ; the language level of this one is a bit trashy when we consider a story based on boats and sailors. However, as I always warn people who read my work: this language was pretty much normal in the school yard 30 years ago when I was a teenager. So, how can you have such a thin skin and be part of the same culture on the same continent if this is really that offensive to you? Where did you spend the last few decades, if you can't take a few hard words from the mouths of kids when these words have been around since before World War I?

 **BROKEN ISLE**

 **FIRST CHAPTER; NEVER LET THE MILITARY DECIDE ANYTHING**

 **The hidden BEAST within**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 06:48am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, submersible workshop B, shuttle silo 3**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Lucas was slowly walking around his most recent ( **secret** ) cybernetic master piece, touring the four feet wide and 12 feet long, segmented metal and plastic frame. He was checking the joints, wires and runes as he mused silently on the vast amounts of bloodletting that his precious _widdle baby girl_ was going to let flow when she activated. He was so proud of all her many clawed limbs, laser lenses and life-force absorption glyphs that he could have wept in joy if the tears hadn't been drugged, whipped and raped out of him long ago by his own family. He needed to remember to create something _extra special_ for them to thank them for making him into such a cold dead hunk of rock.

Pulling on an armored wire to test the reliability of the fittings and the tensile strength of the actual wire at the same time, the teenager let his mind wander along whatever stream of consciousness it was wont of contemplating. His body was well capable of managing on its own for a few minutes without active input. One of the many **abnormalities** and **side-effects** of the way he was ' _conceived_ ' and then ' _born_ '. Guess they don't make private high-class fertility and genetics engineering clinics like they used to in the 1500's… Oh well, Cynthia and Lawrence had wanted a designer baby that was calm and pliable so he would be low-maintenance and not prone to making trouble or attracting attention away from them.

Boy, did they get what they wanted…

Pair of worthless, meaningless, ill-aborted _lower-than-squib_ rejects from a cesspit…

Lucas was the one paying daily the mortgage of pain and depravity that their idiocy combined to the limited competency of the medics wrought into existence. His life was miserable and he had just enough emotions to be aware of how much pain and suffering he was experiencing. Most of the time. On slow days, his lowest threshold of emotional understanding was still too high to realize that he was being shamed or humiliated by the people around him as he didn't care for them, their existences or anything about them at all, especially not their opinions.

-Thoughts & musings-

Lucas was born emotionally deadened due to the plethora of potions and mundane drugs inside both parents when they conceived him. Lucas was an aberration in the eyes of Nature, Magic and Science with all three reminding him daily about how much a mistake his awakening had been.

Cynthia Holt was a lawyer that valorized emotional control and self-discipline above all else. She was doubtlessly the coldest, most emotionally detached woman you would ever meet that was still sane and socially functional despite her state. Lawrence Wolenczak was a multi-genius technologist who was mule-headed and mean-tempered. He was a rabidly violent, self-centered and self-absorbed bastard who thought the World existed to cater his every whim and depravity. And he was quite whimsical and particularly depraved for a man of his young age.

Both of them however shared a _medical situation_ that set them apart from their large families and numerous relatives thus making the plan to isolate and abuse Lucas as instinctive as breathing. The two families were long lines of magically skilled Jews from Eastern Europe, in Hungary. The usual family member was normally a semi-user or full-user of magick with an oddball psionicist thrown in at Nature's whim. Even those who, from the 1700's onwards, dabbled in technology and science tended to couple such with runes and power crystals or at least potions to fuel and maintain the wondrous devices they created.

After almost 700 years uninterrupted of birthing magically capable and very intelligent people, the bloodlines of Holt and Wolenczak happened to give birth in the same generation to their first squibs: people with just enough internal magic to see and perceive the mystical but not enough to actually perform the wanded spells or enact transmutations. Those squibs were Cynthia and Lawrence.

The two families were suitably appalled at the state of their children but they had other kids in that generation from those same parents who had magic available inside of them. Also, none had been born first so the heredity of neither bloodline was challenged. Cynthia was born third child and second daughter whilst Lawrence was born fourth child and third son. This meant that neither family was pressured to keep on having children to create a viable magically capable heir to hold the family wards in effect over the houses and businesses.

Both families were very old noble blood and had several distant relations with the Imperial House of Hapsburg amongst their sixth and seventh degree cousins as well as several far ancestors, also six or seven generations in the past. When the two families moved the principal holdings, finances and population to the USA just on the cusp of the Great War in 1904, they quickly established new trades and workshops, fitting in well not only with the large Jewish population of New York state but also the others all around.

This meant that Cynthia and Lawrence were both born in rich, well established and well known families that were able to easily support them and their endeavors as they grew older and chose their careers. With so many connections, getting into Cambridge University was easy. With the incredible advances made by mundane technology and science, especially electronics and medicine, there was no longer a fear of being poor or sick if you were born a squib as there were now even more options than available to the magical population.

Despite all this, Cynthia and Lawrence grew up cold, detached, removing themselves from family gatherings or decision councils and then blamed the relatives for not listening to them or isolating them when it was their own doing. Their self-centeredness knew no bounds and, recognizing a similar outlook and disposition in each other, they began to socialize more and eventually decided that they should unite their forces against the assemblage of mystically diseased curs that were their relatives.

They married in a rather nice ceremony attended by the majority of both families and several dozen friends or business partners that they had already gathered during their studies and internships. When the wedding night arrived, they put in effect their ' **Master Plan** '; they both took magical potions that would work together to unite their two biologies into a formidable being of high intellect and potent magical abilities while making said child quiet, pliable, obedient and essentially a tool for them to use.

 **Their plan backfired spectacularly against them.**

The potions worked half-way before interacting in a way they shouldn't have as each was designed to be used alone specifically to avoid contamination and crossed effects turning poisonous for the host. The embryo had all the genetic markers for strong magical affinities across all the basal realms of Channeling, Essence and Mentalism but also above that into Primal Essaence and Psionics. The child could possibly be one of the few who are born with the capacities to become arch-mage from the beginning of life, a rarity and great boon to any household.

Unfortunately, Cynthia and Lawrence were severely countered in their plan. The embryo was female, not the Primus Filii Heir ( _first born child & first son_) they wanted. Secondly, the medics detected vestigial genetic markers of an unidentifiable magical creature in the baby's DNA from a point far back in the Family's past when one of their male ancestors coupled with an entity to enter more magical capacity into the Bloodline. The two parents decided that Cynthia would begin a mixed regimen of magical elixirs and mundane drugs to correct the embryo's gender and also remove all ' _creature_ ' vestiges from the Bloodline to keep the child biologically a pure human.

 **It was a catastrophic failure.**

The ingredients in the many liquids that Cynthia either swallowed or received by dialysis were not meant to interact together. The result was a baby boy but whose magical core was not developing as per the expectations of the parents or their various doctors and apothecaries.

 **Lucas Edward Daniel Yitzhak Holt Wolenczak** was born with the magical aura and potential of a _Hedge Witch_ or just a level above _squib_ , so not enough to be accounted even as a _semi-user_ of magic. Even worse, he was still attuned to all basal realms, Primal Essaence and Psionics but had also added extra affinities to the remaining inferior realms of Electricity, Life-Force and Radiation. His magical core was multi-parted like an arch-mage but unstable and leaking heavily into his body, mind and soul thus contaminating and damaging them. The medics had no choice at that point; to keep the child alive, they drained his magical core and placed **Binds** on it to force it to heal the tears and solidify enough to be released so it could grow. It didn't. After three months, the baby's core had sclerotized and stopped growing while the tears had reduced but not completely closed.

The innocent baby boy's magical potential was now reduced even lower to that of a squib barely able to perceive scrolls, potions and magical creatures around him. His damaged core still had the chance to heal if the boy received careful attention during his life. He could end up having some degree of active externalized magic around the ages of 18 to 21 years, after the normal _magical maturity_ and therefore develop as a _late bloomer_ which was a known condition that could be helped easily.

The real problems however were yet to be discovered elsewhere than the toddler's magical core. He was sickly as his body had been poisoned at the cellular level by **Heavy Magick** ; _liquefied Mythal_. That meant that the many energies swimming wildly around his body had merged into the higher power realm of _Mythal_ as they normally do during a conclave or ritual but the energy had then condensed until it became liquid and circulated around his blood and lymph, attacking, damaging and mutating him at a fundamental level.

The medics were obliged to commit even more invasive, more destructive procedures to remove the unnatural Heavy Magick from his body and then transfuse directly by dialysis a series of potions to stabilize his DNA and physical form. It was at that point that it was discovered that the vestigial DNA from the unknown creature had not been removed completely as it was now making an absurdly aggressive comeback.

Cynthia was beyond all anger and disappointment. She began suffering a nasty case of post-partum depression that slowly but certainly turned to detachment from her child and then full-out scorn by the time he was three years old. She abandoned Lucas to his father's violent rages when he was four and divorced Lawrence when he was 7, calling an end to what she dubbed " _A failed experiment resulting from the failed fool that supplied inadequate, dysfunctional DNA material and cheap potions from unlicensed quacks._ " She divested herself of all fault or responsibility, even though she had been a willing participant and had actually found the medical clinics and specialists through her connections at her law firm.

Lawrence was disappointed the first six months the child was alive and then fell into a deep pit of anger and contempt at the boy's diseased, defective body and core, while he also felt a great deal of jealousy and vindictive rage against his having a greater magical potential than both parents put together. His birth and existence was like a slap in the face to the squib. It was like Nature and the Family were saying " _You see this? It was you who was defective at birth, not him. You were inferior, you were wrong, not the Bloodline, not the Family and not Nature. YOU._ "

He could not endure this. This defective, diseased insult could not and would not become his official legal Heir if he could avoid it. He tried every legal maneuver he could, exploiting Cynthia for this while she was still his wife. The situation was untenable to both: the Family charters had clear clauses about Primus Filii and disownment; they could not remove the boy, give him to adoption or abandon him to an orphanage without losing all of their own station, legal status and monetary advantages inside the Families. The two adults were stuck with a defective, sickly, unresponsive lump of flesh that they could not rid themselves of as both Law and Magic accounted them as responsible for his existence. Wanted or not, he was the Heir of both of them and that could not be changed.

The only benefit they had and would exploit to death was that as parents to a magical offspring they were given greater allowances from the Families to care for his health as well as better opportunities to trade and study with the magical members of the Houses. People outside the Families who had ignored or shunned them outright became friendly as they now had influence over a child of great potential. Even if Lucas never amounted to much of anything in terms of active magic, the strength and shape of his core guaranteed his children would be magical. He could couple with a squib, or even a mundane, and the procreates would be at least semi-users of magick. As such, the two parents saw the innocent baby boy the way a rancher sees a bull; which cow do you couple it with to obtain the best new generation of cattle.

The real problems became apparent when he started learning languages by the age of 13 months and could speak English and Hebrew fluently at the age of 2 years. His mind really was the multi-genius that the parents had wanted but it was functioning weirdly. The child had very few emotional reactions and rarely displayed them outwardly. It was only because of the mind healers and psionicists at the hospital that they could guarantee that he was mentally sound and stable, just very quiet and shy.

The two parents thought that at least one small part of the plan had gone right when the doctors and apothecaries dumped more on them. When he was three years old, they did tests on the toddler to evaluate his emotional range and mental responses to situations. He could already speak, read and write five languages, had begun basic math and some arithmancy and seemed to have an affinity with multi-dimensional tasks as evidenced by the massive LEGO structures that littered his room at home.

The diagnostics came back and put paid on the plans of Cynthia and Lawrence to use the boy as a ticket to greater fame and glory. It set off the violence intrinsic to the man's temper while the woman pulled back and let the toddler face the adult male's rage alone and defenseless.

Lucas had been tested biologically and was deemed to be sterile; he would never have children on his own unless he used a hospital and biochemistry lab to help the process. Naturally speaking, he would never be able to produce sperm as the developing testicles were mutated and damaged beyond repair. His lungs were a bit smaller than they should be. His liver and kidneys had weird structures in them the doctors could not identify but that actually made the organs more efficient and gave the boy a level of immunity to disease and toxins that most would envy. His teeth were not completely square like humans but healthy. He did have a few weird glands in his tongue that allowed him to taste more and better than humans. His eyes were completely different but inside the orbs; nothing showed visibly. The boy had the capacity to see an enlarged spectrum of color, had infra-vision, thermal-sight and would soon develop mage-sight naturally as all the precursor signals were there.

Psychologically, it was worse. The many potions that Lucas had endured to make him male, magical and also pliable and silent had all interacted badly and damaged his brain physiology at the critical moment of fetal formation. Later, the energetic residues and further potions to heal his torn magical core had attacked and mutated his mind and soul. The boy was evaluated as being clinically depressed, chronically shy and showed the first symptoms of both oppositional-defiant syndrome and sociopathy at advanced degrees never seen in toddlers his age before. The child was incapable of emotional responses greater than curiosity, boredom, rejection and fear. The mind healers knew that the child could also experience pain, anger and perhaps eventually some affection or love, but that would take psychotherapy, psionic surgeries and a heavy potions regimen between the ages of 14 and 17 at the earliest. Even then, the results would be iffy and nobody could guarantee anything.

The two parents were enraged and dumbfounded at the same time. The child was sick and defective to the point it was questionable if he was actually human, let alone functionnal autonomously but at the same time he managed to end up with more magical potential and better health prospects than everybody else in the two Families combined! What damned creature from Tarterus was this?

After that fateful hospital visit at the age of 3, Lucas was never taken to a doctor again. He would need to run away or call for help himself to receive any kind of medical support. His father began beating him regularly until at the age of 4 when the small sickly child had a dramatic episode of accidental magic that threw Lawrence through the wall of the house, down three levels to hit the pavement in the driveway in a heap of broken limbs and crushed organs. Neither would ever be the same again. Cynthia made miracles of lawlessness as she made the reports disappear, got Lawrence into a private very secretive clinic and dumped her injured son in the arms of the first of many nannies that would never really care or give a damn passed the weekly check they got for doing the job.

-End of Thoughts & musings-

Lucas brought his attention back to the mechanical nightmare in front of him and noticed that he had experienced another small bout of dissociation. He tended to remove himself from the material world and retreat into his mind to idly bask in the thoughts and facts that flowed there. He was at peace inside of his mind. He was even better inside of his fully formed _mindscape_ , deep inside his _Mind Palace_ , but he had work to do and could not afford to take the ten or twelve hours that a good, calming session of _mind-swimming_ would need to be effective.

The imbeciles at New Cape Quest had tried to stop sitting on their hands and came up with an idiocy of such momentous incompetence that it would force the court martial and the governments that had membership in the UEO Alliance to rewrite the charts and laws concerning dereliction of duty, misuse of equipments and men, endangering the National Security of the members states, and so on…

The spectacle would last for years to come and be quite amusing for Lucas. It might even provide him with an opportunity to screw with the bastards who had imprisoned him aboard this floating coffin.

Checking that he had the proprietary remote control for his precious little horror stored in his messenger bag, the 16 year old locked the submersible workshop from the inside and then passed the airlock towards the interior of deck-C, towards the aft of the ship. He moved silently and carefully while monitoring the movements of the few crew left aboard on his heavily modified PAL device to make certain nobody took advantage of the empty ship to try and ambush him for unsavory purposes. He had to injure and maim several people in the three months he'd been aboard to get them to back off and stop trying to beat him or use his body as a fuck toy. Wouldn't do to get caught now with nothing but locked bulkheads and empty air to give assistance if he screamed out for help.

Not that anybody would help if the boat was chock full of humans anyways… His bitter personal experience engraved in scars all over his body showed that for all to see.

After ten minutes of skulking in the shadows, the teenager arrived at an anonymous maintenance closet where he entered and closed the door tightly. Going to the back, he moved silently the wheeled bucket and mops to access the rear wall. Taking out an Allen-key from the cuff of his flannel shirt, he slotted the metal rod in the small hole right under one of the three shelves and swung the hidden door towards him. He quickly stepped through the construction / maintenance doorway and disappeared into the maze of cramped tunnels that criss-crossed the ship's structure to allow power and network wires, pipes and ventilation ducts to reach all sectors and compartments. It was his best, most secure way of moving unhindered and without attacks.

Just three minutes in the tunnel saw him open another hidden steel plate and emerge into the bottom of the damned pit where the crew had put him to live. _The Shitpit_. An out-of-the-way chamber that was actually just a maintenance post to control the life support and sensors inside the Aqua-Tubes for the entire ship. The room had pipes of liquid ammonia and high voltage wires feeding into the sector breaker box right next to his lumpy, worn out mattress and ratty sheets. The place had NEVER been designed for human life to be established here as an apartment but the crew, especially Ford, had wanted him out of sight and out of their lives ASAP. This was the solution. He could live here or be lodged permanently in the brig, under guard and let out only when the cybernetics acted out.

They would pay for this.

And their current set of orders coming from no less than the chief minion himself, William Allard Boyd Noyce, would open the door by which he would walk out to freedom with his head held high in full view of everybody.

Let the bloodsport begin.

 **The Test Plan didn't predict this**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 7:30am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, Bridge**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Commander Jonathan Ford couldn't keep the lump of cold lead at the pit of his stomach from seeming even heavier as he listened to his superior officer, shown on the large main viewscreen up front, outline the last elements of the **hull siphon** tests to be carried out in less than an hour. Firstly, the things were just the newest version of an old invention created by the greek philosopher, mathematician and all around genius: Archimedes; the bilge pump.

Now, the old mechanical pumps had to be triggered manually and their power supply determined just how effective they could be. Inside of a submersible that was under the waves, that meant not a whole lot. Old diesel engines made exhaust vapors that were toxic and batteries would not last long enough to keep the ship afloat to reach land unless your were hugging the coastline already. Bridger's invention was revolutionary in the sense that he had integrated a HTP peroxide fuel-cell controlled by a small simplistic computer circuit equal to a pocket calculator. This was russian technology from the 1960's given a new twist to make it smaller and friendlier. Liquid HTP was safe and reliable and the miniature fuel-cell system was both airtight and uninflammable so the peroxide reaction inside was completely shielded and would not react to, or be affected by, the external situation of the ship.

Nonetheless, Ford was uneasy. He was relieved to see that Bridger, Hitchcock and Crocker had similar qualms and he wasn't hallucinating dangers out of empty air. For the first time that Jonathan Ford ever saw, somebody was saying out loud that Admiral Noyce's plan to test the siphons using the SeaQuest was a pile of cockamamie crap. Bridger had lodged formal protests, written out complaints and called up to the chain of command as high as he could without damaging himself or his staff. It didn't go anywhere near as high as he used to be able to reach. The captain had been reduced to write down and log his complaints with the NCIS and GAO people assigned floating posts aboard the G.W.H. Bush carrier group and hope that nothing went bad.

Now when exactly was it that prayers were actually granted the last time?

Even with the mighty and numerous ships of the Bush group patrolling some 4,000 feet above their heads, it was a long ways down and took lots of equipment, men and effort to reach the SQ if anything should happen. Not the most comforting thought.

The tall black man took off his day cap and passed a weary hand over his bald scalp, rubbing the skin to help the blood circulation as he hoped to avoid a stress-induced migraine. He wasn't prone to them unlike Bridger or Westphalen but when he got one, it could lay him out for two days straight. Better to not suffer that ailment at this moment.

After getting the last minute details, he and Kathy were about to sign off and begin checking across all decks the readiness of the few people left when an emergency beacon was activated about ten kilometers of the ship's left side. Something motorized was moving inside the military exclusion zone and nobody had detected them yet? How in the Hells was that possible?

Ford felt a cold wave of dread slide down his spine as he listened to the orders coming from admiral Noyce as he overrode Captain Bridger's good sense. Bridger and the carrier Bush's commanding officer wanted that un-vetted shuttle to either rise to the surface or wait at fixed depth and stop moving until assistance vehicles from the carrier could reach them for recovery. Admiral Noyce ran roughshod over them both and ordered that the damaged shuttle be brought aboard SeaQuest for the flimsiest of motives: **cash**. He wanted to be able to bill the shuttle's owners for the rescue, parking, parts and labor so as to boost the ship's budget. So he told publicly. Jonathan doubted the ship would see more than a handful of credits on all of that.

Given the danger level and the uncertainties, both Captain Bridger and Admiral Donato who had charge of the Bush group speed-typed their misgivings and opposition to the new orders while at the same time telling Ford to get people into the parking silo hub to receive the newcomers and lend assistance.

The two senior officers were barely finished sending their letters of grievances that the shooting had begun as the control hub's access hatch opened and let in mercenaries equipped with dart guns to put to sleep anybody they saw.

War had come to SeaQuest and now they were in the midst of trench warfare right inside their own corridors. How the Hells were they supposed to win this with just fourteen people aboard, two of them medics and another being the smarmy, rebellious little kid nobody wanted here. They were so screwed it wasn't even funny!

 **Madness in the halls**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 07:22am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Lucas sat alone, silently with the lights turned off, in conference room 3 of Deck-A just 50 feet behind the bridge's clamshell doors as he had been ordered to do by Ford. He was listening distractedly to the chatter squawking out of the ceiling loudspeakers, the ongoing conversation between the SeaQuest's bridge crew and Captain Bridger who was presently located in the Operations Room of the G.H.W. Bush aircraft carrier sailing roughly 4,000 feet above their heads with its entire combat group.

This Bill Noyce inspired mess was a clusterfuck in progress and it was quickly devolving into a masterful level of FUBAR-ness that only a drunken bum of a sailor on the last huzza of his botched career could invent. There weren't no ways it would end up going well for his poor creamy-white hide, not if his personal history was the measuring stick by which the situation was compared.

They had the biggest submarine WARSHIP built by humanity to date, carrying 12 Synthium tipped ICBM's and 4 mark 11 nuclear torpedoes in the forward tactical bay and what were they doing with it all? Playing at who could hold his breath the longest before turning blue in the face. Morons, the lot of them. It could only come from Admiral William Allard Boyd Noyce, that idiotic idea to use a fully commissioned, fully armed and enabled nuclear boomer to test out the new versions of the hull siphons that Nathan Bridger had designed.

Evacuate the ship, delay projects, put off critical research, kick out Darwin and relocate 221 of the 235 crew off-boat to test what was in fact just a souped-up newer version of bilge pumps. Could they have used an old Aegis destroyer or Arleigh-Burke hull to do this? Yes, they could have. But Noyce came up with the argument that it would be more striking and more visually poignant for the Pentagon paper pushers if it was done with Nathan's own boat. The new design was more susceptible of quick acceptance and faster inclusion in new ship designs if it was done spectacularly this way. Lucas wasn't convinced in the least and Bridger had the good sense to not be convinced either.

This whole mess stunk of another of Noyce's get-rich-quick schemes, like the very one that had Lucas parking his pasty complexion on the hand brakes aboard the biggest, baddest, most ill-conceived teenager-sitting service the UEO Navy could float. _Introculi_ that fat slovenly cad was, and even Nathan _Hale-the-almighty-hero_ Bridger couldn't deny that anymore. Not that he had ever tried all that hard anyways. For an old washed-out drunken wastrel of a beach bum, the man had maintained a startlingly impressive level of clear-headedness and objective reasoning. When he was sober, that is.

The adolescent closed his flint blue eyes and passed a weary hand through his long wheat-blond hair, messing it even more than usual. The orders Bridger was giving to Ford and Hitchcock were some of the most retarded he had ever heard in his short three months in close contact with the navy and sailors in general.

The ship was empty with only 14 people left aboard and they were now letting a shuttle full of unknown, un-vetted people of suspect origins aboard. All because they had an emergency beacon active? Wasn't this supposed to be a restricted zone under military exclusion protocols? How in Hell Everburning had they gotten this close to the SeaQuest in the first place? Why not direct them to the Bush group above? If their navigation system and rudders were damaged they could wait for a pair of MR shuttles from the carrier and its escorts to lift them up. There was ABSOLUTELY no need to get them inside the SQ under any reasoning by anybody who thought strategically or militarily.

Lucas was a sixteen years old civilian without any military training or experience but even he could figure out that " **military exclusion zone** " and " **tactical alert status** " meant you don't invite people inside the hull, especially with the short staff and only five security officers left aboard, one of which was that fat slow-mo crud Crocker...

Could anybody but him see this was gonna go down in the annals of the Navy as a monumentally bad idea with catastrophic consequences?

There were days when Lucas thought that the US President had signed off on his inclusion to the ship's crew just to have at least one clear-headed, right-thinking person aboard ship to offset the collective ineptitude of the other 234 narcissistic self-deluded _children_ that composed the staff. And he wasn't even paid for this. He wasn't even lodged in a room fit for human habitation. He was barely fed and had to scream bloody blue murder to get anything for his most basic necessities when others wasted food they didn't really need or want and indulged in booze, drugs, porn and playing video games right on the ship's control consoles instead of doing their damn jobs...

Where the fuck were NCIS and the FBI in all this? Probably in a bar in DC wailing about their budgets getting cut because general so-and-so's latest toy had busted the bank for no visible results. Again.

Well, t'was useless to mope and cry about it now. The bastards were about to enter the hull and he had precious few minutes to lock down everything tighter than his bitch mother's cold unbeating heart before the organically extruded matter embraced the rotating pneumatic machinery and aspersed all of their poor lowly lives with its ever-loving crap.

"Harken and hold fast, boy! Time to save the lives and skins of the undeserving and be accounted a good guy again." Lucas whispered to himself cynically as he left the conference room and entered the maglev to reach his cabin faster. The horizontal transport was supposed to have been shut off during the test but the teenager was the ship's premier cyberneticist and had overrides on everything with a CPU in it, including Dr Cranston's cardiac pacemaker and the vocalizer in the head of seaman Dannon's cheap, squicky inflatable rubber doll that he though nobody knew about.

Lucas ignored the sudden indignant bitchings from commander Ford coming out of the maglev speakers and his PAL in a weird stereo effect. The boy was well aware the lift was supposed to be offline, parked in its maintenance position as he was the one to place and lock the carriage that way. That was the logical thing to do given that they would flood the inside of the ship to test the siphons. But since flooding a functional nuclear ship was illogical and accepting unknown strangers aboard said nuclear ship at the same time was even more illogical, Lucas thought he was entitled to put logic in the bin and do what was necessary to survive the coming tidal wave of horror that was mere minutes from swamping them.

Like any boy born and raised in America in the last century, Lucas knew well the one and true way of getting through a mess when it happened. If the people around you put logic and morality in the trash, pull out the guns and knives and get badder than the neighbors. When your survival was in doubt, having the bigger, stronger hand-cannon would always see you safe and sound at the end of the day.

 **More madness in the halls**

 _(_ _Angels in Cages - Caravan of Thieves_ _)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 07:36am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Colonel Shraeder, formerly of the UN blue helmets and the US marines before that, was giving the gimlet eye towards his "men" if they could be called so. They were physically, morally and intellectually a poor showing compared to what he used to command in the corps. The shuttle they had commandeered to do this mission was a civilian thing without any armor, weapons or even any type of self-inflating lifting gear in case of accidents. It was a piece of crap redeemed only by the high-class scientific comms and sensors that were built-in all around the boat. Small mercies, such as they were, he would take and be thankful for. It's not like he'd get anything else positive out of this damn job.

"All right, you twits! Were docked in! Open the top hatch and run for your lives! We have less than 20 seconds before the bridge reacts to what they see on their monitors! Go! Go!" he screamed at the thirty assembled mercenaries jam-packed inside the cramped university shuttle.

There was a mad dash up the ladder and the whine of compressed-air guns going off, shooting tranq darts at the two shuttle silo operators to knock them out without killing or injuries. Shraeder had insisted on a bloodless action before he accepted the job. The ship's crew were not his enemies and he was no traitor, he would not shoot to kill against these men.

As he went up the ladder himself he was greeted by his Ex-O that informed him they had penetrated the ship's corridors already and were in the process of opening the doors towards the bridge area. The maglev was offline and parked in its maintenance slot, as foreseen by their planners. The former US Infantry corporal was surprised at the lack of armed reaction so far. He had expected the few people onboard to activate defenses or remotely close and lock doors but that wasn't happening so they were in luck. Both Shraeder and him knew it would not last long.

Just as the colonel gave instructions to keep two men inside the shuttle to keep it ready for departure they heard an eerie whine followed by the shushing noise of pressured gas flowing from nozzles above the doors around the parking silo hub. In a cacophony of inhuman screams, five of their mercs fell to the deck plates, bloated and discolored from the clouds of wet steam heated to 400 degrees Celsius that killed them instantly.

Shraeder was practically foaming at the mouth rabidly as he bellowed orders to his people to get to engineering and shut off the damned plumbing before they lost more men. He wanted water, air, heat, gas and sewage completely shut off _Right-Fucking-Now_ if not sooner. As the mercs ran off in three different directions to find and disable the central life support controls, the colonel turned to his Ex-O and asked tartly "Are you happy about their defenses now?"

Wisely choosing silence, the soldier-for-hire walked out of the control hub, heading towards the bridge where all the critical data access was centralized and locked. Hopefully, there weren't anymore built-in structural defenses like those steam pipes spread around. Frowning in worry, the soldier remembered their briefing before leaving the rallying base and clearly recalled that they had been told the boat had never been built, or even conceived, with active lethal defenses like that. The worse they were supposed to encounter were automated doors and maybe the crew would try to suck the air out of a few sections, but nothing this aggressive or fatal. Damn! What else had they got wrong or out of date?

A long, painful, inarticulate scream of misery resounded through the corridors when they were halfway to the bridge doors. Pushing the button on his talkie, the corporal asked for call-in from all personnel. Two failed to answer back. Looking at Shraeder's closed-off face, the merc ordered a team of two to find their missing people and call in the moment they were spotted. This wasn't good.

"Damn, boss! Were not five minutes aboard and we lost seven people already! That's not the briefing we got this morning! SeaQuest was supposed to be an easy target with weaklings inside. Who botched the intel?" the low-rank soldier asked his chief.

The colonel was thinking about events and came up with numbers he really didn't like. They were down almost a quarter of their fighting force and had barely set foot in the place, let alone got near the critical system yet. This would not be a good day; he could feel it in the marrow of his bones. SeaQuest may have offloaded most of her crew but somehow they kept the **Guardian Beast** aboard. They would all bleed and weep before noon; he could see the writing on the wall well enough to predict this.

 **Ah, Hells!**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 07:46am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

The team of two soldiers dispatched by the corporal didn't need to go far from the silo hub to find their missing mercs. They also didn't have to wait long to find their breakfasts again as they splashed from their mouths onto the decking. What was left of the two unfortunate soldiers-for-hire needed a shopvac to recover rather than a gurney or body bag.

After a few minutes of retching, the older of the two wiped his mouth and then flicked his talkie to call his boss. "Heya boss, we found our two missing guys. Not much left of them though. They got sprayed with somethan' that ate em up. They look like dog barf to be honest. Anything on your end? Over."

The mercenary knew they'd get yelled at, especially for puking their guts out the way they did, but he didn't care anymore. Five minutes in and they had 25% of their lot on the carpet never to get up again, it wasn't what they signed up for. Somebody on this tub had a nasty temper and the two guys were willing to bet it wasn't Shraeder or his Ex-O Claude Hanson who had the worse attitude anymore.

The talkie beeped and the corporal's voice came out "Tell me which frame you're at then get back to your group and stay together. No more lonesome exploring or going off script. We lost too many right out of the blocks to allow for more deaths. Over."

After answering their boss, the two mercs decided to stop by the lavatory hall near the shuttle hub to wash out their mouths and take a breath before jumping in again. Both were cousins who had worked together for over a decade, mostly doing errands, running merchandise of the hot and bothersome variety and dodging the Law at every chance. Heavy action and violence like this wasn't their thing, not if they could avoid it. They took the gig cause Shraeder said it'd go off without shooting anybody.

Funny innit how come nobody told the other guys that tidbit...

As they both went inside the showering and toilet hall, the door closed behind them automatically and would not open again until the Bush carrier group's rescue teams came and swept the ship for intruders and bodies. They would need body bags and HAZMAT suits to clean the room.

 **The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…**

 _(The Sealed Kingdom – Adrian Von Ziegler)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 08:14am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, deck-A near the bridge doors**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

As colonel Shraeder, formerly of the US Marines Corps and the UN Blue Helmets, walked slowly down the deck-A corridor towards the bridge, everything seemed to go quietly just as the tactical forecasters of his employers had planned.

The shiver of dread sliding down his spine was not imaginary.

Any man, woman or unlucky misbegotten child that had ever served in an armed troupe knew from bitter personal experience that NOTHING ever goes according to plan, especially when the plans are created out of thin air by office-bound minions devoid of any genuine field experience to use in their machinations. And being the commander of an entrenched compound or a massive aircraft carrier did not count as field experience in any way worth mentioning. Those positions removed their commanders so far away from reality and their own men's lives that they weren't experimenting anything but paperwork and ass-kissing. And that was the good commanders; the average bloke just put his yeoman in the doorway and told them to blockade all incoming so it didn't reach the Big Man.

 _Snort!_ And those people call themselves servicemen? Please! The civilian scientists that were usually aboard the SeaQuest were more real servicemen than all of the Brass-level officers Shraeder ever saw in his life.

Arriving wearily at the clamshell doors on the bridge's right side, next to the maglev terminal, the fallen colonel saw that his present workforce had actually managed to _pull their finger out_ and got the hydraulic clamp installed and ready to pull apart the door valves. Humph! Maybe they could actually pull this off as he wanted. Shraeder did not see himself as a traitor even though legally and morally that was his status. He saw himself as the tool by which a solution to the pollution of the oceans would be achieved. If he had to break laws and reputations, so be it. Breaking bodies and lives however, that had not been acceptable in his agenda. The cause needed to stay clean and presentable or they would fail at winning public support. Also, he did not initially see the people aboard ship as real enemies, just small obstacles that could be convinced to stand aside or be run-around easily.

 _Optimism in warfare meant botched plans that got men killed_

Shraeder had managed to convince the mercenaries that the bloodless strategy would work better and they would have less to fear after leaving the ship as nobody would be screaming for vengeance. That the job would require twice more men and time was the accepted compromise but the employers, the planners and the mercs all ended up agreeing that the UEO would be less fanatical about finding them if no blood was spilled.

 _So far, nobody was getting what they planned or wanted. Big surprise there._

Shraeder still had that damnable shiver slowly crawling down his spine, warning him that the organic excretions were about to encounter a rotating pneumatic device and be reattributed most generously across all of their lives. Damn, he hated having gut feelings like those! Especially since normally, they ended up with him in an anonymous clinic somewhere getting stitched up by a quack that was popping more pills than he gave his patients before operating on them.

Shraeder's Ex-O, former USMC corporal Claude Hanson, gestured at his Boss to come and look over the setup before they powered up to force the doors.

"Hey Boss. We purged the oil out of the doors' mechs to make them less resistant to movement and we took out the manual breaks that were hidden inside the frames in the walls. We're good to go online."

Shraeder gave the entire apparatus a gimlet eye, still weary of his bad feelings, and backed up a good ten feet with Hanson at his side before signaling the team to crack the bridge. As the whine of the electrical machine was heard, a small scratching noise came from the ventilation ducts in the ceiling above the colonel's head. Hard earned reflexes and long-used skills at tumbling out of the enemy's line of fire had him jumping backwards and rolling on the floor away from the area just four seconds before it all went bad.

A miniature canister dropped from the ventilation grate in the ceiling, dropping just in the middle of the team of four mercenaries working by the clamshell doors. It exploded about four feet off the ground, disbursing a five feet wide cloud of atrociously eye-searing fluorescent pink gas that covered the men, machines and walls. Everything stood still for about three seconds and then the screaming began.

The men dropped everything they held and began scratching out their eyes or ears, dropping to the floor to roll around in frantic, desperate panic. It was now obvious that they were trying to avoid or run away from something that they thought was attacking them, trying to crawl on their bodies and get inside of them.

Shraeder had his confirmation when a dingy little ditty began playing through the Public Address system speakers in the corridor, putrefying the air with its toxically ironic words.

 _(The Hearse Song - Brillig)_

 _The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out_

 _The worms play pinochle on your snout_

 _They eat your eyes, they eat your nose_

 _They eat the jelly between your toes_

 _Do you ever think when a hearse goes by that you may be the next to die?_

 _They wrap you up in a big white sheet from your head down to your feet_

 _They put you in a big black box and cover you up with dirt and rocks_

 _All goes well for about a week_

 _Then your coffin begins to leak and reek!_

 _The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out_

 _The worms play pinochle on your snout_

 _They eat your eyes, they eat your nose_

 _They eat the jelly between your toes_

 _The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out_

 _Be merry my friends, be merry!_

 _The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out_

 _Be merry my friends, be merry!_

 _Be merry my friends, be merry!_

"Mwuhahaha! Harken and Behold, ye landlubbing knaves, that which your Lord hath wrought! This be the end of all traitors and curs upon these waves! Arrrgh!" a young man's darkly amused voice shouted through the PA speakers along the evil laughter.

Shraeder now knew what had caused his men to collapse into psychotic breakdowns; they had been poisoned so as to hallucinate being eaten alive by worms while locked inside a buried coffin. They had scratched out their eyes, ears, tongues and good portions of their exposed skin thus grievously maiming themselves for the rest of their lives. If they didn't die of blood loss, they would recover from the poison, become aware of their now handicapped state and commit suicide rather than live out their existences with diminished capacities like this.

So much for SeaQuest being a weak, undefended target during the hull siphon tests.

Hearing a weird mechanical noise in the venting ducts inside the ceiling, the corporal placed his cellphone inside through the grate just above himself and filmed a few seconds before pulling back. When he replayed the film for Shraeder, they saw what looked like a child's remote controlled toy car except it had a large pincer on the rear bumper which held another canister similar to the one that dropped from the vent a minute ago.

Somebody was compensating for the ship's lack of static structural defenses by improvising mobile ones with cheap Radio Shack toys and repurposed riot-police gas grenades. Who in their right mind would deliver warfare-grade chemical weapons by the vents using toy cars? What kind of madhouse had they stepped into?

"Shraeder to hub! We lost the clamshell doors' team. Send another four guys. The bridge doors won't open nicely on their own; we still have to force the issue to be allowed in. Over."

As the veteran soldier took his fingers off the talkie's button, one of the search teams called in and asked the fatidic question: "Has anybody heard from the Marlow cousins yet? They found our guys by the entrance to the shuttle hub's support equipment section but we haven't a peep from either since... Over."

The corporal was quite industriously working on cleaning the poisonous crud from the hydraulic jack and its wires besides the clamshell doors and made certain to give no outward signs of having followed the convo behind him. Given the furious look on the colonel's face, it was better that way. The SeaQuest's crew had demonstrated to be far more bloodthirsty than their planners had told them; he had no intention to face even worse odds at the hands of his own boss.

 **Running amok everywhere**

 _(_ _Two of Us - Curtis Eller's American Circus_ _)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 08:21am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Lucas whistled gaily, quite off-key and quite badly, a most lurid tavern song straight out of the 17th century about captains, cabin boys and phallically shaped wooden peg legs that were used for a lot more than just walking around on the decks of wooden sail ships. Now, Lucas had a very good musical ear, a decent singing voice and even composed a few things for his synthesizer keyboard but there was just something more delinquent, more fun, about singing ribald lewdness when truly off-key in an ear-gouging tone.

Pity he was the only one listening to his phonic exploits. Ah well, ' _beggars can't be choosers_ ' the proverb goes.

Opening a large metallic box that was securely bolted to the wall and covered in colored decals warning people to most specifically **NOT OPEN** the thing, the teen dropped the broken padlock he had cracked and used his now free hands to pull on his thick leather and rubber insulated gloves. After making sure both hands were covered, he then proceeded to do what would give Hitchcock three different conniptions at the same time: he swung the red fire ax he took from its place in the wall mounted emergency equipments cabinet and aimed at the principal power allotment breakers.

The way the ship's electricity was made and spread was simple: you had a set of one cold fusion reactor, two chemical reactors, two diesel-electric engines as back-ups and several huge acid-based batteries. All these devices had armored wires that pooled together and went up to here: the central control panels, also known as the **main spread-out breakers**. Each deck was dedicated one large locked box inside which there was a massive breaker for the central power coming into the junction and about three dozen smaller breakers to manage the power outgoing to specific areas of each deck without having to leave this nice, heavily armored and insulated room just a hundred feet behind the humongous spherical construct that housed the parking silos for the ship's dependent craft. There was a similar console set-up in engineering but it was a back-up, not the main one. Also, each deck had a smaller local breaker box at the entry of each of the sectors that were represented by a lever in front of Lucas.

By putting his ax through the wires of specifically chosen levers, he could cripple the ship's mobility and weapons without ever compromising life support or the parking silos. He HAD to keep the silos operational as the SQ did not have escape pods of any sort. To evacuate the ship under duress the crew needed to use the shuttles and sea crabs or take the ship to the surface and get out in the inflatable emergency rafts. Bridger's original designs had in fact included the very first models of submersible escape pods ever to grace an American sub but the cheapskates in the Pentagon and the Capitol had axed the idea just as surely as Lucas had just consigned the ship to parking itself here for the next week until the breaker boxes could be fixed properly.

Well, with either Kathy or himself doing the job, it would take about two hours tops.

The invaders on the other hand, would need a month just to figure out Ben's inventory management system, followed by another month to track down where the parts were hidden in the ship. The fact Lucas had used his cellphone to send a voice command to malware he had buried in all of the ships communications, emails, TXT, SMS, and all manner of accounting documents that were produced or transited by their servers could not in any way be responsible for Ben's inventory suddenly being encrypted with a 4024-bit system that needs to be unlocked by a password sung in gregorian tonalities while Darwin MUST be laughing in the background. No, it never could be his fault...

Snorting in derision at the menial idiocy of terrorists, criminals and everybody the least little bit close to the military world in general, the adolescent hoisted his new steel toy onto his left shoulder and pulled a granola bar out of his flannel shirt pocket. He slowly munched his meager dry breakfast as he moved to the next phase of his active resistance to the beknaved twits that dared to invade his territory.

SeaQuest might be a shitpit filled with dipshits, but they still belonged to him and he wasn't the sharing type. He learned that attitude from his mother. It was her fault he had a cold dead rock for a heart. It was also her fault that he stayed sane enough to be aware of that state of affairs while not having enough emotions to care a whit.

 **Bless the little children... Then curse the mongrels all through adolescence**

 _(_ _Graveyard_ _-_ _Devil Makes Three_ _)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 08:29am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, deck-A around the bridge**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Colonel Shraeder was impatiently gazing over the shoulders of his four new men as they were setting up the hydraulic pincers to force open the doors that kept them away from the bridge and its treasure trove of encrypted classified data. His Ex-O was busy finishing the task of draining the oil out of the hydraulic lines that moved the massive doors so that their own machinery would strain less as it worked to open the clamshells.

The disgraced marine was making an effort to ignore the four quickly decomposing stinking corpses on the floor, all pushed further back along the side of the wall, just like the other five mercenaries in the corridor with him who had obvious trouble concentrating on their jobs. Looking upwards at the vent grates they had blocked off, the veteran soldier wondered again what happened to their erstwhile opponent to keep him silent so long. It never bodes well when the enemy is silent; it means he's planning something both devious and cruel to inflict upon unsuspecting men.

If the colonel still had his original platoon of marines he would have been hopeful of getting the job done despite the odds. With these guys, though... And the **Beast**... He was facing the **Guardian Beast**...

A slightly pudgy, out of shape young man dressed in the same grey combat fatigues as the rest of the mercs came up to the colonel and leaned against the wall, trying to catch up his breath. He panted while looking around at the dead bodies, wide-eyed in fear, worried that the mysterious enemies who killed so many of their men would materialize out of thin air.

Shraeder grunted an odd sound at the man, either a welcome or contempt for his lack of physical capacities, it could mean anything. The new man straightened up and held one of his three leather work satchels close to his chest, like a shield against the harsh, violent world around himself.

"Bowman! Did you manage to find anything about the state of the ship and her systems yet? I'm not paying you to just hold the tech until we need it like a damn coat rack! Tell me something useful for a change!"

Lance Bowman swallowed passed the dry lump in his throat, remembering that while Shraeder had wanted a bloodless mission, the outcome was already quite different than expected. This meant of course the man had frayed nerves and might not shy away from hurting or killing anybody in his own team that he saw as too useless or just too weak to follow through with the final mission goals.

Getting himself under a semblance of control, the IT engineer stared Shraeder straight in the eyes and answered the bad news he had come to deliver. "Well, we won't be going anywhere in this tub anymore; the main drive, auxiliaries and positioning thrusters are all offline. There isn't any electricity going anywhere to those compartments, our guys say that even the lights don't turn on. That means that somebody got to the main breakers and sabotaged the entire electrical grid right at the source. I accessed the officer-level diagnostics tools that I hacked in preparation for the mission and they show that the only things left with any power in the cables are life support and the shuttle hangars. Everything else from weapons to laboratories to public toilets are all dark until we find the wires that are cut and fix them."

Shraeder pursed his lips in thought and asked "Did you send a team to find the damages? I hope it's not another ambush like what was waiting for us here the first time around."

Bowman shook is head negatively "I already know what was done and where. The basic security cameras are part of the life support systems that's not off-line since they are connected to the same circuit as the emergency lights in case of fire and main power shut down so they still work fine. I traced the power cables from the fusion core and hit a snag in the principal distribution node on deck-D not far from the actual engine block. By the images, it looks like somebody took an axe and slashed the wires coming out of the main breakers and also smashed out several specific breaker levers to take out systems. It would take four to six hours just to fix the wires themselves, another four or so for the levers and safety fuses behind each. All in all SQ's crippled but awake, just like a quadriplegic in a hospital bed. Awake and aware, but immobile and defenseless."

Shraeder swore lowly before turning towards his men at the clamshells. "Get them doors opened! Now! We need inside there to save our lives just as much as to get the payday we came for! This is no longer a game! We have a _heavy_ prowling the corridors looking for blood. We either get in the bridge to loot the datastacks or we leave the ship empty handed right away. If we do that, the chances of our employers having an understanding reaction to our hasty retreat are nil. The way things are, we find a way to survive aboard this derelict or we die out there when our backer hunts us down for our failure."

 _(The X Files – opening theme)_

The five soldiers got back to work with added vigor and speed whilst Bowman signaled the colonel to pull back with him so they could speak quietly. "I found something critical in the open systems when I scanned them before joining you here. We have a _hacker_ on board. Most specifically, it's somebody rated as a _'High-Lord Grand-Master Splicer_ ' that's on the lookout lists of every police, security and intelligence agency that I could interrogate to confirm his ID, even though there's no warrants or BOLO on him, just notifications to be very careful with him and not piss him off. Here's the picture from his shipboard access card. You'll note that he's listed as the SQ's ' _Chief Computer Analyst_ ' and ' _Chief of Mammal Engineering_ ' right from the moment he first boarded the ship in New Cape Quest three months back."

Shraeder looker at the file displayed on the touchscreen tablet, staring at the photograph in disbelief. This was the guy he had heard about in dark corners of forlorn taverns and unplumbed depths of the Dark Net when he trawled for jobs? A bloody kid! He was just turned 16 years old last December for Christ's sake! What fucking pit of bitch crap had they fallen in?

"Bowman, are you sure? This is the CCA for the boat? He's not just a junior assistant or a receptionist or something low-key like that? What are his pass-codes? What's his access like in the systems?"

Lance Bowman shook his head again and replied dourly "I can't breach his file beyond the public service jacket on the ship's publicly accessible website that they made for the population to browse and get infos about the ship's official mission and commercial projects. Anything about the kid is under the kind of security level and encryption that make me wonder if anyone beneath the armed services' Chiefs-of-staff at the White House could get anything. I doubt even captain Bridger has access high enough or vetted enough to read anything in that particular file. The kid is armor-plated, despite that he seems to come out of nowhere and have no familial or social attachments that I could find besides the publicly stated parentage and schooling."

The colonel grunted in dismay "That smells like a back-stopped cover, or at least a heavily redacted, _read-with-eyes-only_ program like the CIA or NSA run when they go _deeper-than-Dark_ on an emergent threat inside the US or NATO territory. Not good. At all. Try to find everything else on him as soon as you connect your machines and the data downloads are in progress. My gut tells me this is the bastard that's been offing our guys and we can't afford to dismiss or underestimate his threat level. 16 year old kids don't reach senior officer positions on nuclear warships just as a favor to daddy, no matter which ass Lawrence Alexander Wolenczak kissed at the Pentagon."

" _The truth is out there_ " Bowman thought in amused silence as he planned how to hack deeper into the impressive cybernetic defenses the ship's servers boasted. Now that he knew who custom-made those programs and defenses, he wasn't surprised anymore. Even the most menial hacker would protect his own backyard first and foremost, then do the assorted jobs on his docket. Lucas Wolenczak had obviously done much above just 'due diligence' when securing his digital domain, as expected of his presence aboard. Which in itself explained and justified easily the expenditures and problems caused by him being here.

The grinding of the clamshells opening manually, and forcibly, interrupted further planning just as much as the sound of a gun and the sudden death of the poor idiot standing in the doorway while it moved. Apparently, the bridge crew were alive and kicking to receive them. Good. They could answer some questions about the little runt while the data was being stolen under their collective noses.

A strange chill wind passed around Shraeder's spine, making him look behind himself just to be certain everything was empty in the corridor. All the other guys were patrolling and gathering the remaining crew in the mess hall to facilitate detention. He needed to check on them soon. He had a bad feeling suddenly that he was perhaps too late already.

 **Be merry my friends, be merry!**

 _(The hearse song - Brillig)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 08:47am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Chief of security Lieutenant (senior grade) Manilow Crocker huffed an exasperated breath as he climbed down the stairs in the dreary shadowed corridors again to avoid another enemy search party. Apparently, the invaders knew how many of theirs were left aboard and they were searching the whole boat repeatedly until they had the full tally, despite losing power to two thirds of the ship and everything being dark. Well, he wished them all the ill luck that they could get and Lucas's intervention on top! Crocker may be old, fat and washed out as an officer due to his many indiscretions, alcoholism and bum knee that got broke twice too many times in bar fights, but that didn't mean he was either blind, deaf or dumb, no matter what Noyce thought.

Their pale-skinned little Casper look-alike wan't no angel in training, he could tell you that much just by the look in the kid's eyes when he was pissed so hard he was repressing the urge to do bodily harm unto the _redneck idjiot_ that bothered him.

 **Men who had killed humans don't have the same eyes as others who never did.**

Westphalen and a fair few more aboard were landlubber fools for not seeing that clearly. Even Nate, blind as a mole and higher than a kite on bad days knew better than to discount the kid on just his age and the way he dressed or spoke. _Snort!_ Any raw recruit that finished Boot Camp alive oughta have the brains to see a teenager doesn't get a job that normally goes to a man three times his age just cuz daddy sucked Billy-Boy's 'nads in DC to _lubricate_ the deal.

This had all the hallmarks of ' _Black Operations_ ' in a ' _Deeper-than-Black_ ' kinda ways that set his blood to freeze in his old heart. A teenaged man-killer with a high tolerance for bloodshed and the cold calculative temperament to keep himself in line without anybody to hold his hand. A competent, reserved and calm individual with mental capacities at _multi-genius super-prodigy level_ and the self-discipline to control himself and others to force through the successful completion of his mission.

They weren't fucked just a bit, weren't they...?

Crocker's PAL vibrated silently; no sound, no lights and almost no shaking. If he hadn't held it in his hand he could have missed it. Not that it mattered as that was a TXT message coming in. Lucas again. He just cleaned out two more mercs who tried to take liberties with the female engineer that Kathy had assigned to watch over the fusion core. They thought they could take turns raping her before bringing her to the mess hall to park her with the others. They wouldn't be raping or killing anybody else anymore. Pity the poor engineer was traumatized more by what Lucas did than the attempted rape.

Ah well, such were the vagaries of warfare. Nobody won anything and the survivors often wished they had'na lived through it awake and conscious.

Now then, where was that blasted little prick he heard mucking about?

Crocker placed his PAL back in its holster and took a two-handed grip on the crowbar he had appropriated from a firefighting equipment closet two decks down earlier this morning when the lights went out all over ship. If Lucas gave the signal they were doing a silent run against the enemy's baffles, well then, he the old submariner would oblige him quite kindly. It was part and parcel of submarine life after all, doing stuff silently in the dark.

Something that some _malecon_ and his arm-twisters should'a remembered a'fore they pissed on his patch.

"Ah, there you are! Come to grandpa little kiddie, he has a world o' hurt just for you! He, He, He!"

One heavy overhead swing later and the (now confirmed) brainless minion would no longer be prowling the halls for defenseless women to assault. Crocker passed the crowbar into his belt to hold it in place while he huffed and strained against the 250 pounds of deadweight he was trying to pull out of view and into a nicely positioned recycling chute that went all the way down to deck-E where the triage room and trash bins were. After relieving the bloke of his 9mm Glock pistol, AR-15 assault rifle and four flash-bang grenades, three knives and two garrotes, Manilow was relatively certain the guy was now divested of all useful stuff and pushed / dumped him into the chute.

Why in tarnation had Nathan designed these things big enough to pass even somebody of his own corpulent girth wearing full body armor was gonna remain a mystery. Crocker knew about his friend's short stint of detached duty in the CIA during the 1980's at the very beginning of his Navy career and wasn't gonna ask details. He didn't want the headaches, nightmares and paperwork that came with the answers. Not to mention that knowing would probably give him enough a boost in his security clearance to know about why Lucas was really aboard and he could very well live without that particular stain on his soul.

Manilow's PAL vibrated again, this time hard enough to shake even the hip holster where it was stored. The older officer took it out and used his pudgy fingers to dexterously work the small buttons and miniature touchscreen until he could read the message. The red characters and flashing emergency banner around the message text were enough to tell him something bad had happened.

The mercs were in the bridge and they had killed two people. They had judged the pair of helmsmen to be useless as the ship was paralyzed and immobilized so they killed them off. The merc Boss kept Kathy Hitchcock and Jonathan Ford alive to pump them for information and as hostages, just in case he needed to negotiate safe passage off ship. Those two seemed safe, for now anyways. There was a batch of their other crewmen being pooled into the mess hall on deck-B to better contain them.

With both Lucas and himself prowling about, it would'na work all that well for them, no matter what they tried to do.

Crocker stashed the PAL back at his hip and took the bloodied crowbar back in his favored two-handed grip as he set about hunting for two-legged rats in the depths of SeaQuest's darkened bowels. They may have guns and grenades but he had stealth and the lay of the land on his side.

He also had the uncontrollable, unpredictable adolescent pest mucking about but that wan't on nobody's side so he didn't really count him as an asset. Manilow just hoped he wouldn't be declared as another enemy on top of the mercs. Nobody knew what would eventually set off the kid and he prayed today wasn't it.

 **Hack & Slash like in a Dungeons & Dragons game**

 _(The Straight Razor Cabaret - Voltaire)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 09:00am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

The arterial spray pulsed hard and strong all the way up to the pipes and grates along the ceiling of the compartment, painting them red in an artistic swirl that could only be achieved the natural way. With a warm body, a black soul and a sharp blade wielded carelessly by the hand of someone long passed caring about the value or sanctity of human existence.

Lucas stood back, watching detachedly as the lifeblood of his Nth victim of the day stopped arcing in the air and just flowed lazily down the front of his barely clothed chest. Who the hell was it that was stupid enough to come on an armed raid wearing just jeans and a t-shirt under his flack vest? Then the fucking asshole stops all alone in a dark room for a puff on a joint? Pathetic. Even as a civilian kid Lucas knew better than to pull crap like that on an operation in progress.

Stepping forward, the teen grabbed a clean segment of the cooling corpse's shirt and wiped clean his small blade. The diminutive implement was 4 inches long in total, the blade had two edges, both smooth and sharper than any scalpel or straight razor. The grip was flat, matte black rubber and exactly the same size as the blade to balance it for throwing and palming blindly during a scuffle.

The straight half-inch wide stiletto-style blade favored short stabbing motions aimed at strategic points of the body rather than wide slashing gestures. This was a precise tool of cold assassination and cruel bloodletting, not butchery and open combat. It was perfect to be kept discreetly in a sleeve or belt sheath under an oversized flapping flannel shirt, the way 80% of young men in North America and Europe dressed.

Lucas had forged and honed the titanium alloy himself. He had fitted the ergonomic grip himself. He had done like the Japanese sword-masters and tested it on five throats and spines before declaring the blade's design true and reliable. Then he produced three dozen which he promptly squirreled away for the inevitable moment when society decided to beat him down and show him just how little valued his life, health and welfare were.

Man, would people get a surprise when they tried that! Lucas had a list of victims longer than both arms and he hadn't really bothered counting those that died in groups or under the obscure cloak of closed rooms and booby traps. Only those he finished off face-to-face deserved to be remembered, if only to analyze how his equipment and weapons had performed versus the opponent in question.

Lucas remembered facts and figures, data streams and columns of numbers incredibly well. Human faces and identities... Not so much... Mostly because he couldn't be arsed to bother, let alone care.

He blamed dear old dad for his chronic apathy and crass disregard for humanity and life in general. Just take a look at how the man manages his only child's life and you'll understand a great deal of how Lucas became the way he is.

Secreting the minuscule blade back in its hidden sheath at the small of his back, the teenager calmly frisked the exsanguinated cadaver for any equipment of use or resalable value. The 9mm Glock and AR-15 were of course obvious. The knives were sub-par and too big for Lucas's tastes but he took them anyways while thinking of arming those members of the crew that would soon be freed from captivity. The man also had a steel-wire garrote, steel knuckles with spikes, and the most obviously fake cheap throwing stars that Lucas ever saw. These things were probably sold online to kids and wannabe ninjas who couldn't afford the real weapons. Fucktard.

Silently emptying the guy's wallet of all cash for his own use, Lucas eyed the credit cards and wondered again at which dirty, forlorn backwater tavern these mercs had been hired from. Who the hells came on a sensitive SECRET mission to hijack a military ship with his pockets full of personal informations and giveaways? Shaking his head in disgust at such incompetence, the boy opened the small bag still containing six small mediocre joints and smelled them. Bah! Cheap stuff cut with tobacco, portioned out in half doses to make it too weak to incapacitate the user. Useless for resell and Lucas would never be stupid or desperate enough to use them himself. Down that road lay misery, uncertainty and waste.

Dropping the dope on the floor, he kept looking around the dead man until a small bit of leather thread caught his attention. There, attached to the inside of the left boot, was an item that looked like a medallion or pendant. It was darkly colored and very thin, and invisible as it was pushed down almost to the ankle. Pulling it out, Lucas saw that it was actually a small amulet made of stone-like substance with engravings on both sides. The grayish stone meant he had to look at the medallion from very close in the darkened room to see the silver inlayed into the etchings. This was no cheap talisman sold in a tourist shop. The piece of jewelry had an icon – religious? – on one side and what looked like text on the reverse. It didn't look like any of the multiple tongues that Lucas had learned. It honestly didn't look like any human tongue used on earth, either in the past or now.

The teenager knew his worse weakness in his character was his oversized brain and overactive mind which lead to an insatiable curiosity, especially towards the unusual, forbidden and hidden things that humanity tries to forget. This medallion seemed to fit in several of these categories.

Ah well, he needed a new hobby anyways...

Hearing a noise by the doorway behind him, the boy hunched down to make himself smaller and retreated sideways in crab-like fashion until he was partly hidden by the desk and chairs. He took the Glock and silently cocked it, taking off the safety with an unconscious flip of the thumb. The adolescent flexed his trigger finger a few times to get a feel of the gun mechanism's sensitivity while his eyes tracked the shape of the man that walked into the compartment after pushing open the door that had stayed ajar the whole time bloody murder was carried out inside the anonymous office. Lucas switched the view mode inside his eyes so he could perceive the heat spectrum to follow the movements of the man. It allowed him to confirm what he had heard with his extra-sensitive ears, another merc loitering outside the office, waiting on his partner to give the all clear or call for help.

The game was up, it seemed... Well, no.

Lucas's left hand went to his belt line and swiftly pulled out his small knife and had it pointing forward in a blink just as he placed the gun next to his head, pointing upwards as he coiled himself to spring into action.

As the mercenary walked into the office using a glow stick to see the carnage wreaked by unknown enemies, he was completely taken off guard when the slightly built, underfed and overworked teenager jumped up in his blind spot and rammed two inches of titanium steel into his spinal column, rendering him both quadriplegic and dead at the same time.

The boy pulled his blade loose at the same time as he dropped the pistol in line with the space between the door and doorframe. He let the new cadaver drop noisily on the floor and, just as planned, the noise brought in his partner. The man was scowling something fierce as he stormed into the dark compartment, an angry put-down on his lips about wastrel scum who should be doing their jobs, not be looting around for coins and dope in the dead of night.

His anger towards his merc buddy and disbelief at seeing a kid in the room were both silenced to the tune of a loud 'BANG' as the 9mm _parabellum_ shell tore through his face, just a bit beneath the right eye socket and into his brain after that then exiting the cranium's rear in an explosive cloud of blood and brains.

Jumping over the blood pool on the carpeted office floor to avoid soiling his shoes and leaving red prints along his escape, Lucas quickly moved himself out of the office and then towards the maintenance closet three rooms down. Once in he closed and locked the door so he could act in peace. He ambled over to the floor-set sink & drainage pad where the janitorial crew would wring mops and purge the wheeled washing buckets. The drainage pad was 2 feet wide on each side. It also had a cleverly concealed hinge at the far side, near the wall. Lucas took out a small Allen key from the cuff of his flannel shirt and slotted it into the near lip of the drainage pad to unlock the pin holding the setup in place. Once popped, he lifted the whole thing, revealing a maintenance duct underneath. A man-sized, Lucas-friendly duct.

A few maneuvers later and Lucas was happily worming his way through his favorite, silent and exclusive path around the ship. Nobody could move around these maintenance shafts like he could, given his small size and slight build. Sometimes, being just 5 foot 10 inches and 149 pounds sopping wet could come in handy. Nobody else on board could fit in these ducts as easily and comfortably as he could. Kathy had the size but lacked flexibility. Westphalen was slim enough but too gangly and gauche. Nobody else came close.

Their loss.

Whenever Lucas needed peace and quiet, the maintenance ducts and ventilation pipes provided the best, dry and safe havens he could get inside this floating coffin. The teen was certain Bridger never designed them with that in mind, but would never tell him.

A few more minutes of crawling around and the adolescent arrived at the point where he needed to choose if he came up on top or went down to the lower deck. Hearing some noises from hurried footsteps accompanied by the huffing and grunting of exerted men running towards where the other merc had been shot meant that he was dropping down.

Oh well, he never mucked about deck-E all that much. Might as well enjoy it while he was forced to do it. It's not like anybody was around to scold him or tell him to get lost in somebody else's turf for a change.

 **They took the ship or the ship took them? Such was the question.**

 _(_ _Sugar in My Coffin - Curtis Eller's American Circus_ _)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 09:25am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, all around the boat**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

 **The Village Sheriff**

 _(Rivolta Silenziosa – Humanwine)_

The mercenaries were panicking all at once. Somebody who was both much more than but also much less than completely human had unleashed nameless horrors and abominations upon their ' _inoffensive_ ' and ' _defenseless_ ' persons. Hummm… Mercenaries who invade a ship under false pretenses and shoot people to sleep with dart guns while also carrying AR-15's and Glocks _'Inoffensive and defenseless_ ' they say… These guys were obviously in the wrong job category, Senior Lieutenant Manilow Crocker, the ship's chief of security, thought glibly as he listened to the PAL network's **phantom surveillance frequency**. It worked like an old CB or HAM radio, open to everybody that synthonized the frequency; to contribute you just push the big red button and shout, letting go when you were done.

It made an appropriate and useful background noise while he plied his trade-in-stock, _police brutality_ , upon the oily hide of the unlucky bloke that some tetchy pasty little gremlin in their walls had dropped into the recycling chute just for good old Manny to find and play with. And play he did… There were questions that needed answered on the quick and snappy and some pliers, metal wire and an acetylene blowtorch were a good complement to his electrified nightstick, pepper spray, pulse pistol and brass knuckles. The shelves full of cleaning and decontamination liquids and spray cans could also be put to unhealthy uses if it was discovered that this little fishy was of the durable kind. If all else failed, he could just use the crowbar he still carried around.

 **A Bill of Ill-Health**

 _(Dr. Flynn - Caravan of Thieves)_

Ensign Cy'Bella DiNavarro was a field medic and a damn good one too! She graduated the Naval Academy officer's program with high marks and then went through med school part-time while working on a navy base in the Texas area of the Mexican Gulf as an apprentice ambulance worker and then apprentice nurse in the base hospital before finally taking her full license at the ripe old age of 27 years old. She was shipped from Texas to the SeaQuest on the request of Admiral Noyce without having ever heard of, let alone met, the man before in her life. She was to this date the only medic who could convince either Lucas or captain Bridger to accept sedation during a long-term procedure; everybody else had to do it with just a local anesthesia or pass the bucket her way.

This meant that the poor ensign was actually the one medic aboard who saw more of the two most important, politically and economically connected people aboard. Most people thought Lucas was dirt poor and useless, that it was daddy paying for everything. Most nobody knew nothing about Bridger's money or what he did with it and most seemed to not care. She knew. Patients can be obtuse and close-mouthed when they don't trust you or blab their lives out when they do. She was trusted and so she heard a lot, even stuff she wished she didn't have to.

Unfortunately for the two mercenaries presently strapped on her beds in Convalescence Room 6, immobile and silent due to the drug she had sprayed them with a few minutes ago, she had listened to Lucas. A lot. And a great deal of what he spoke of during the weekly visits to try healing his many injuries and scars wasn't fit even for impolite company in the isolation cells of the psychiatric ward of a super-max penitentiary.

Too damn bad that she had such a good memory and she was an ' _auditive_ ' type of learner rather than ' _visual_ ' like the overwhelming majority of the population. She heard what the adolescent said and remembered without too much effort… Even in the dead of night when she prayed to God, His Father Joseph and Mother Mary and all His Angels Above to please make her forget so she could sleep without nightmares anymore…

Yes, she remembered what Lucas spoke in hushed tones about the tortures and medical experimentations done to him in his young life. And now these two would remember too and she would engrave it in their skins with blades and acids that she would then ignite so that cleansing fires could purge their Evil whilst inlaying in scarified glyphs what lessons and forbiddings she had taught them.

In the back of her mind - or was it her PAL device in the back pocket of her uniform pants? – she thought she could hear Lucas tell her to wait until they unfroze to hear them scream or else she wouldn't know if she was botching the job or if they felt anything at all. It was morbidly cruel advice but good nonetheless.

She locked the convalescence room door, pulled the blinds and sat with a paperback booklet about traumatology and physiotherapy to wait out the drug's expiration. It would also help guide her blades so that she didn't accidentally kill or maim a man when the CIA and NSA could get so much more out of them than she ever would. She had to be careful about having viable bodies to forward upwards in the custody chain. Who knew? Maybe someone would remark her good efforts and she'd get a bonus at the end of the month.

 **The Ghosts in the Machinery Rooms**

 _(The Cog is Dead - The Copper War)_

The young ensign clenched spastically both hands around the shaft of the massive 20-pound titanium alloy pry-bar, weeping silently in rhythm that matched subconsciously the flow of the congealed blood and brain matter sluggishly sluicing off the metal tool. She had been assaulted, her clothes torn and molested most vilely but, by a miracle of _Unholy Darkness_ given blond hair and blue eyes, she had avoided being fully raped.

Her body had been saved; her mind however had not.

What Lucas did to her two would-be rapists would remain engraved in her soul for the remainder of her days. That a teenager, barely sixteen years old two months ago, could have so much violence in his heart and know so much about pain and torture…

The ensign would forever be grateful to her young savior and call him her friend in broad daylight. At night though, she would batten the hatches, lock all bulkheads and sleep with her back against the wall, clutching a gun and a knife. Just in case her good dark little friend had an urge for a nightcap with her.

It would not be safe to invite him inside her home after lights-out.

Chocking back a gut-wrenching sob as silence was now the only thing keeping her enemies at bay, the female ensign shifted her feet and ever so slowly inched out sideways from between the two large water boilers that fed the steam turbines for the secondary drive shaft assembly. She was finally free to move about the engine compartment as the mercs had come, seen the body and left in a hurry. She could now close the main blast doors and seal the auxiliary hatches to secure the room manually against the invaders. Once in bunker stance, the room could hold out for five solid days. After that, whether the doors were breached was immaterial. She had no reserves of food and no bathroom to bring in fresh water, let alone give her a toilet and a shower stall. Passed five days, she would be dead of thirst and starvation and no longer care anyways.

The young woman tried to calm her heaving chest, desperately trying to ignore the fact that the convulsions were due less to her racing heart than to the dry heaves she started up when her eyes accidentally scanned the bodies as she walked around the consoles to engage the hatches and doors.

A quarter of the room was stained in red mixed with darker splotches from the shredded bits of multiple organs and several negligently artful splashes of brain matter. And Lucas had been _negligent_ in his handling of the guys a whole lot for a machinery compartment of this size to have 25% maculated in body fluids.

Swallowing back the bile that threatened to come up, the sailor did a last check of the doors before moving on to the ventilation ducts and maintenance crawlways. She had not really seen how or where Lucas came in the room but it wasn't by the normal everyday methods. Unlike most others on board, she knew about the tunnels that wormed their way between the decks and rooms of the ship to allow pipes, wires and ducts to reach all the corridors, compartments and machines that kept the ship functioning through all its many jobs. There was no way she was going to let the vent grates and hidden maintenance trapdoors unlocked.

Not if she wanted to truly be safe.

After that, she would busy herself by kneeling on her nice cushy chair and waste her time left until rescue arrived by reciting all the mind-numbing catechism she had rote learned in parochial school in her infancy. At this point, she would even gladly accept strokes of the wooden ruler on her hands when she missed a verse of botched a cardinal rule rather than open her eyes and see anew the results of what Lucas could do with a box cutter, screwdriver, metal wire, axle grease and a fire axe.

"And my brand new best friend the pry-bar that he was kind enough to field test for her to show her the ropes of its usage" she thought while absent-mindedly caressing the object of her safety. It might have been responsible for the man's scrambled brain-gore decorating the walls in a crude attempt at replicating the abstract style of painting but she wan't givin' it up. Nah, han! T'was hers now and she was keepin' it she was! Lucas could just lug around that nice sharp axe he found. And it even had a pointy spike on the back to dig and break through furniture, too. He didn't need her bar so she was keeping it close to her heart, cold and solid, just the way she liked it.

"Hail thee, Blessed Mary, Mother of God, you heart is amongst us, granting us the Grace of its Purity…"

The poor female cried all the tears of her injured soul, alone ( _she hoped_ ) in the dark room, the only light coming from a few scattered LED indicators on the control panels of heavy machines that flashed softly to indicate what their problems were. She knew what the fucking problems were, damn it all! But what could anybody do when the solution was more damaging than all the nasties put together?

"Still, it was awfully nice of the little guy to let me keep that nice heavy grey pry-bar when he left" she sighed mentally in deep disappointment between prayers. "If only he could have taken the gooey mess and the stench of shit and piss from the men's ruptured bowels when he went… It would have been the decent thing to do, ya know… But he's a boy and they don't clean that good so I guess its normal in a way…"

With another deep sigh and effort of will to ignore the sights, smells and her own tremors of bone-deep anguish, the ensign continued on her self-assigned mind numbing mission to ignore her situation. For once, religion was doing exactly as designed, advertised and taught; it removed her from reality and gave her soul oblivion.

"The Lord is my shepherd…"

 **This ain't no game no more**

 _(Liberators – Epic Score)_

 **Monday 10th of February, 2020; 10:03am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship, bridge**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Colonel Shraeder was well passed angry into seeing red as he slowly prowled around the bridge, malicious intent and violence exuding from every pore of his body as he digested the latest news from his Ex-O. Another nine dead men. Three ' _missing in action_ ' to keep it exact, but in these circumstances anybody with two neurons to rub together would know that meant deader than a doornail.

They had lost TWO-THIRDS of their forces. How in bloody fucking hell did they lose TWO-THIRDS of their men in two hours? On top of the losses in the shuttle hub, at the bridge doorway, and several disappearances there was now a mini-riot in the mess hall that just left six more of his men dead and the SQ crew thinned out by four bodies but not in the least cowed or submissive.

Rubbing his temples with both hands, the veteran soldier prayed for endurance and patience from any divinity that he'd heard the name of in his life. Strangely enough, it wasn't having any effects...

BEEP! WARBLE! BeeeeeP! "OH for fuck's sake! Not again!" exclaimed Lance Bowman from the science station on the rear-left portion of the bridge. The man was waving his hands around, trying to disperse the new batch of brackish stinking smoke wafting up from the console he was trying to hack for access to the ship's trove of highly classified informations. The system was not cooperating and seemed in fact quite determined to resist his best efforts at charming his way in.

It was the goal of the mission since that's what the clients were paying for. Keeping the mercs and SQ crew alive were neither paid for nor important. In fact, the way things were, the clients might end up wanting to pay to mop up their mercenaries out of existence so they could deny ever being involved with such an ineptly executed operation. Heaven Above knew Shraeder wouldn't put this day on his resume when he went around looking for other jobs to do. Even if he survived to talk about it, let alone carry on as a soldier of fortune, blabbing about doing stuff in the **Guardian Beast** 's backyard was courting bad Karma on a biblical level and nothing somebody with good survival instincts would ever do. Shraeder was both intelligent enough and humble enough to understand that bragging about surviving a close-up with aforementioned **Beast** was not the best way to guarantee his longevity.

More warbling noises from the rear-bridge caught the colonel's attention as these were of a sort that did not result from Bowman's attempt to hack the datastacks. Turning towards his IT engineer with a stormy expression plastered on his face, the soldier knew in advance that something bad was happening just by the look of haunted fear worn by the younger man.

"What?" he asked in a tone of voice that forewarned of impeding violence. Not waiting for an answer, the veteran walked rapidly to the station where Bowman sat and parked himself at the man's shoulder, hands clasped behind his back in an attempt to keep himself from lashing out physically at the techhead. Bowman had demonstrated to be the most competent and reliable of his subordinates to date on this mission; harming him would only insure that Shraeder himself didn't see the outside of the SeaQuest alive again.

 _(_ _Rivolta Silenziosa - Humanwine_ _)_

Said IT engineer was having a conniption. The numbers on screen couldn't be real! "Colonel! Some half-wit spawn of a whore just opened up the water intakes in the maglev tunnel! Were sinking straight down like an elevator cab! Down to 4,300 feet and lowering! Were going at about 100 feet every 15 seconds but it'll get faster as our weight increases! We have to do something or we'll all drown!"

Shraeder turned to his favorite minion on the team, who was also the only woman under his command right now. She was his favorite because she was the silent type and never put her ego on the table when doing a job, unlike the men who all thought and decided by the feel of their balls.

"Connors! Close the clamshell doors and lock them down! Put the bridge on DSV protocols now!" Turning towards the two surviving bridge crew, Shraeder asked them "How do we secure this pipe?" as he gestured to the Aqua-Tube that throned in place of glory in the middle of the bridge deck.

Ford nudged Hitchcock with an elbow and she cleared her throat noisily to obtain the man's attention. She got it fast, and more than she cared for. At least he wasn't interested just in her boobs like the three male mercs who hadn't stopped ogling her chest since they took over the room.

"Colonel. The pipe cover controls are on the face of the tube, right in front of the captain's chair. The lever closes the cover and the numeric pad controls the lock and subsystems such as lights and back-up public-address speakers built into the Aqua-Tube network. Punch in code _**## 2004-12-24 ## LWOL SQSEC**_ and that will lock down everything in that segment of the pipes."

Shraeder stared at the female lieutenant-commander with obvious distrust but complied with the suggestion. He pulled the lever and was gratified to see the clear thick synthetic crystal cover slide over the opened mini moonpool, establishing an airtight seal. He entered the code on the small numeric pad next to it and pressed enter. The entire Aqua-Tube went dark as all systems inside went off-line but didn't seem to do anything else.

Exhaling a relieved breath, the colonel stood straighter, savoring his small victory over adversity as he visually surveyed the situation on the bridge. He still had his Ex-O and three minions plus Bowman at hand's reach. The rest of the ship was now in serious jeopardy as things were bound to get hectic when the SQ survivors and his remaining mercs would see the water flowing from the doors of the maglev shaft.

"Colonel, we have a situation here. Were stabilizing at 6,000 feet under the waves and the Bush carrier group is still above our heads, shadowing us as the hull siphon tests required." Lance Bowman called out from his station. "However, the safety depth for the shuttles we have on hand is 5,000 feet if the hulls are armored. At 4,000 feet our stolen university shuttle was already red-lining it. Now, we can't even use the MR-class boats to leave. We have to find a way to purge the extra weight or nobody's leaving this tub."

The old marine wiped his forehead and asked Ford "Was this part of any contingency plans you had established as a matter of policy in case of invasion or mutiny?"

The black skinned male shook his head dubiously and spoke in low, painful tones to avoid aggravating the bruising on the side of his face. He was pretty sure that the merc who hit him had broken his jaw and cracked a few teeth, quite intentionally at that. Maybe Ford shouldn'a shot dead one of their guys when they opened the doors? "Wazzna us. Dunno who. Can your guy look in shaft to see?" he spelled out slowly as his jaw hurt with each movement.

Shraeder turned towards his IT man and asked out loud for a sit-rep in the maglev shaft using the cameras. He got a shake of the head in the negative. "The cameras are all off-line, both regular and emergency circuits. It looks to have been done manually at the local boxes. When I try to access them, the system says the programs are running fine but there's no peripherals at the ends of the wires to send us a signal. And it's like that only at the end of the pipe in the maintenance parking slot of the carriage. We have visual and sound in the rest of the pipe all the way to the stop near the bridge."

"So it wasn't a hack that blinded us, they took out the listening posts manually. Not Wolenczak, then, he would have hacked the systems and played them on a loop to show us an empty tunnel no matter what happened in it. This was somebody else from the SQ people we haven't captured yet. Show me the remaining people on the main monitor."

The fallen marine looked at the large view-screen at the front of the bridge deck and frowned as he saw the faces lined up on two rows of seven pictures, some lined in green (captured) or red (at large). The two most worrisome were of course the little teenaged runt Wolenczak and the fat pig Crocker. From the five others still roaming free, it was either that female engineer that had escaped from the engine room, ensign Burgess, or the second man from the security department, seaman 1st class Landry. The quartermaster Benjamin Krieg was a glorified paper pusher and the medics were no-brainers as well as no-starters. The male corpsman Yagher Iggs was a boosted ambulance jockey that went into the military to escape an abusive family as soon as he hit recruitment age at 18. The female field medic Ensign Cy'Bella DiNavarro was small, about 130 pounds all dressed up and devoid of history towards aggressivity or trouble.

His money would be on Crocker or Landry, maybe even Krieg. Looking at the pictures of the massive levers and circular valve controls that operate the water intakes he knew it would take an adult of sizable body mass and strength to operate. That took out the kid, women and young corpsman as too small and physically weak to operate the mechanism.

"Boss!" the mercenary corporal called out in a panic "The guys in the mess hall are being attacked by a monster! It has six legs and no head or ass they can make out!"

Before the flabbergasted colonel could comprehend that particular statement, the captive female officer spoke. "It's the hyper-reality probe. Somebody's got control of the HR probe and brought it inside the ship to use as a war-drone. Three guesses who's responsible for that small piece of ugliness mucking up your carefully laid plans and the first two tries don't count." she finished with a bitchy smirk.

Shraeder and Bowman grunted at the same time "Wolenczak" and the other mercs all shared a weird look. Their boss always got strange when the kid's name came up.

Corporal Hanson decided to clear up a few things and ask out loud "What about the kid, Boss? He's 16 years old just barely and doesn't have any training at all in weapons or combat. How can he be so much pain in our ass?"

The veteran soldier actually laughed out an angry, despondent sounding outburst that had no mirth at all. "Let me tell you Hanson, it's not what his file says that'll kill us all today. It's the verses and chapters the Pentawhores blacked out in what was left after the NSA Ghost-Ops managers redacted most of his file by ripping out whole pages. Whatever the SeaQuest crew think they know about him is nothing but lies and fabrications and even they aren't all that safe right now. I guess it depends on how they treated the kid while he was in their care. We'll see soon enough."

Corporal Hanson exclaimed full of doubts "Just what is this guy, that he has you pissing yourself just by saying his name out loud? I know Bowman's a sissified fool but you, Boss?"

( _Never Back Down – Two Steps From Hell_ )

A voice came from the loudspeakers all around the bridge deck, filling the air with words as poignantly toxic as any bioweapon ever let loose during a war. "I am the Owner and Operator of the SeaQuest. She is my private property and plaything. Just as are the bodies and souls aboard her baneful hull. And you, Claude Hanson, mongrel spawn of a cur and his bitch, are nothing before my eye and judgment. You will survive this day that you may rue it and all those that follow as I ply my art and science in the pursuit of depraved experiences and knowledge most foul. Know that your Destroyer is come."

The scornful voice fell silent; the dull click at the end signifying the comm-line had been turned off. Every mercenary in the room looked at each other while the two SQ officers huddled closer together in the crook of the joint between the Aqua-Tube and the elevated platform at the rear of the bridge. While they had both thought of Lucas as a slightly standoffish, aloof and lonesome boy, neither had actually thought him capable of outright violence. Sure, they both knew about the whispers around ship and the weird looks Crocker exchanged with Bridger anytime the subject was talked about near them, but still...

And now Shraeder and Bowman seemed genuinely scared, and this voice from the ceiling that was clearly Lucas speaking out... WTF?

( _The Origin of Species – Audio Machine_ )

There was a sudden explosion of synthetic crystal shards and twisted pieces of steel-alloy framing followed by gushing sea water as the entirety of the Aqua-Tube wellhead exploded outwards, splashing the forward part of the bridge in shrapnel and salty wetness. A whirring, hissing bluish contraption of metal, plastic and malice had entered the fray and fallen upon them mercilessly. Standing twelve feet tall by four feet wide, equipped with eight lower clawed legs and innumerable arms and whips, the torso pivoted and positioned outwards and downwards eight of its upper arms, opening the claws and extending the chain-sabers mounted on all the forearms. Four circles of twelve small blue LED lights running all around the thing's dumbbell shaped body lit up and emitted little blue beams as they scanned all over the room and acquired targets to process. Then more spikes, blades and fully animated barbed tentacular limbs extended outwards as the whole machinery began to spin like a demented break-dancer.

The crazed voice of **Lucas Edward Daniel Yitzhak Holt Wolenczak** was heard to let out a maniac laughter of pure unfettered evil through the speakers around the entire ship and the surrounding waters for a mile outwards, drowning out the people's shouts and pleas for mercy in its anger-fueled craze. The HR probe's bigger and nastier cousin, Lucas's own secret creation and ace-in-the-hole, _The Engine-of-Pain,_ was let loose to destroy and defile the invaders so that they may know once and for all the final Truth.

Lucas will never kneel, bow or submit to anyone.

Lucas will be free, safe and whole, whatever the cost.

Unfortunately for the mercenaries and some of the SeaQuest's less reputable crew, the **Guardian Beast** had awakened and **It** hungered for tainted blood and diseased souls. **It** would feed well upon the unworthy this day.

( _Ad Mortem - Adrian Von Ziegler_ )


	2. Chapter 2

The author wishes to express thanks to anyone who may read his story and encourages them to leave reviews, comments or even flame it hard. As with any who try their hand at publicly expressing an idea or story concept, all feedback is important and welcome.

 **Disclaimer:** I do not own SeaQuest, Star Wars, nor any other sci-fi or fantasy series, movies, comics, cartoons or news items used in this fiction as they belong to the creators or broadcasters or publishers who put them out for consumption by the public.

 **SeaQuest**

 **BROKEN ISLE**

 **SECOND CHAPTER; TREASUREFUL TRENCH OF TONGA**

 **Post-action reports; Captain**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Wednesday 12th of February, 2020; 7:45am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, captain's quarters**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Nathan Hale Bridger, veteran captain of the US Navy for some 37 years, retired for 7 years and back in service again as of barely the beginning of January 2020 a month ago, was giving his last few days of life a very truly critical glare indeed. The cup of freshly brewed allongé espresso sitting by his left hand half-drunk already hadn't helped with making his evaluation of things more positive in the least.

Barely out of its maiden voyage, the semi-fatal first mission in the Marianas Trench against Madeleine Stark, his ship had been put under orders of the most idiotic kind that he had ever seen in his career, or in fact his 62 years of life in general. He had publicly opposed Noyce's idea and filed his objections, thankfully, before witnesses of clean pedigree and irreproachable service records. Being prudent by nature, he had also kept all of the notarized paper originals at hand. The digital copies of those objections, questions and attempts at the most basic logic he had entrusted Lucas to keep safe from manipulations or disappearance. All these decisions had paid off as he still had his job and fledgling career with the UEO intact. Publicly at least, that's what it looked like.

That confounded fool Bill Noyce couldn't say the same anymore as he was now on unpaid suspension courtesy of an indefinite stay in the Navy's disciplinary barracks in Tampa (Florida) pending an Article 32 hearing that would probably lead to a general Court Martial on a colorful plethora of charges. Menial little nothings like:

1) Peddling his position, rank, station and authority to help the career and commercial gains of a friend who was developing a new device for the UEO Navy, meaning Bridger himself;

2) Criminal misuse of the UEO's flagship & crew in unsafe conditions whilst attempting material and monetary gains for self and associates;

3) Criminal gross negligence during equipment tests around active nuclear generators and weapons;

4) Granting unlawful access of the ship, a class VI restricted zone similar to an aircraft carrier, to persons not only unvetted but **actually unknown from anybody** during a critical test and tactical mission;

5) Failing to report the emergency when it began so as to obfuscate his participation and responsibility;

And the ever favorite of all judges and juries the World over:

6) Attempting to destroy or waylay material evidence in the case as in: letters, communications recordings and notarized testimonials exchanged between the ship, UEO HQ and the Bush carrier group's command chain.

Yes, Billy Boy was in a heapin' heap o' steamin' doodoo; that he was…

Nathan sipped a bit more of the warm espresso, relishing the strong flavor as much as the caffeine boost it gave to his much needful brain chemistry. He had just gotten an electronic letter from the cabinet of Andrea Dre, the secretary-general of the UEO Treaty Membership's council, via official Fleet channels. While the overtly written political verbiage and legalese seemed to exonerate him and his crew _in toto_ , it also had several little dollops of poison hidden in it. The UEO word-smiths had placed their malice between the paragraphs, not inside them, in such a way that reading between the lines of the phrases themselves was useless unless you understood the whole context of the UEO Treaty's mechanics as well as the unspoken political by-plays going on in closed rooms in New Cape Quest.

Basically, Nathan was burned-out as an officer because he should have kept the SeaQuest on the surface near the Bush and asked the other officers to help him boycott the test while going over Noyce to inform both NCQ and Washington DC of the unfolding events. If that protocol for dealing with idiotic staff-level officers had been followed, the whole mess would never have happened and the crew would have continued their tour of duty blissfully unaware of the slumbering wild **Beast** anonymously hidden in the SQ's bowels. Namely one blond-haired, blue-eyed teenaged apostle of chaos.

Nathan passed both hands over his face, dumping his glasses on the desk as he picked up the paper print-out of the letter his personal attorney had sent him at around 3:00am, ship's time. His old friend since high school had been corrosive in his evaluation of Nathan's chances at getting out of this with his job, let alone his pay grade and security clearance intact. His recommendation was to fall on his sword gracefully; resigning whilst citing the depression that had kept him isolated on his island for seven years just might protect the little there was left of his financial safety and reputation.

The alternative was to testify at Noyce's Court Martial while unblemished by the events. In that case, he should pray real hard that his words didn't lead to either military or civilian/criminal federal charges being filed against him. Both situations were a very real possibility despite Andrea Dre's transparent attempts at a positive spin on the situation that was more pious wishes than anything solid.

Nathan grunted in disquietude, wishing fervently he had seen Bill's ploy for the man's usual kind of stupid _get-rich-quick_ scheme that he had been famous for during their Naval Academy days. He had done the same all through the junior ranks but had seemed to grow out of that attitude when he reached command ranks. But he hadn't really changed anything by all appearances that were now visible.

At least, any decisions from either the UEO cabinet or the Pentagon would be slowed down by the need for Noyce's court martial to happen before any further follow-ups could happen. In the meanwhile, the pentawhores had used the oldest trick in all the books of Navy regs to stab him where it hurt. They had issued an order of emergency inspection, by a full 2-star general no less, in what they called ' _immediate urgency_ '.

The SOB had already been flown to Brisbane on a red-eye flight out of Pearl Harbor on Monday evening and was impatiently waiting on somebody or something to ferry him over to the Bush group and then down to SeaQuest herself. The orders confirming the inspection's schedule and legality came in not even five minutes after Dre's lackluster letter of tight-lipped, standoffish support. It wasn't planned that way, noooo…

Pull the other one, why don't you…

The veteran mariner pushed the higher brass's papers aside and took up the one thing sure to put him off his breakfast, thus his reason for having only an espresso this morning. The final tally of fatalities, injuries and damages to their crew and home.

Damn but somebody had waged trench warfare in his corridors… There was structural damage and chemical contaminations that he was gonna have a hellavu problem explaining to that inspector when he finally arrived to snoop around.

 **BEEP!** "Captain, it's Hitchcock on deck-B near the shuttle hub. We finally managed to unlock the public lavatory that was out of order and we have the answers to why. We need HAZMAT in here in a bad way. It looks like somebody got hold of the bio-hazard bin from doctor Westphalen's department and found a way to use it offensively against a pair of Shraeder's mercs. What's left don't even look human and sure don't smell like it either. Over."

Nathan put his head on the desk, silently praying for strength through this adversity. Somehow, he didn't think it would help any better than all the other times in his life before.

 **Post-action reports; First Officer**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Wednesday 12th of February, 2020; 8:06am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, bridge**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Jonathan Devin Ford, commander and Executive-Officer, second-in-command of the biggest, best designed and best equipped nuclear submarine in the USA's current history, wanted to crawl away into a very small, deep, dark hole, scrunch himself into a fetal ball and cry himself into oblivion.

The bridge deck was such an irrecoverable mess of twisted steel, crystal, plastic and bloody gobbets of flesh embedded into everything else that it all made the aftermath of the worst _Arab Spring_ riot of 2011 look tame in comparison. Officially, Ford was still on mandatory medical leave for injuries to his head and jaw from the mercenaries that attacked him after he killed one of them when the clam doors were forcibly opened. Officiously, the medics from the Bush carrier group didn't want him anywhere near a duty station or active mission until he got a thorough psych eval for multiple psychological traumas suffered when he witnessed the _Engine-of-Pain_ at work. Given he had suffered night terrors for the last two nights straight and even had experienced a few moments when his mind played tricks on him and he could swear he still heard the damn _Thing_ whirring and grinding and slashing and tearing, just in his blind spot, just behind him, mere inches away…

Lucas always wore a smarmy smirk when he looked at Ford, the fucktard little piss-ant… Jonathan had been grazed and bruised a few times by the massive war-mech as it tore apart the bridge's consoles and furniture as much as the mercenaries, without much care for either. That blasted, shit-eating grin told the commander that their resident teenaged terrorist had probably wanted it that way, too…

The orders they got from Noyce about testing the siphons with the SQ herself had been the lowest point of military incompetence he had ever witnessed in his entire life. Even in the books of military history there wasn't a blunder this irredeemable. Then compounding it by opening the boat to complete strangers just on the virtue of a questionable emergency beacon going off inside a clearly indicated, strongly patrolled military exclusion zone… No, it wasn't bright and the admiral would get his just penance for that fine example of moronism.

Having some ' _thing_ ' like Lucas stashed away aboard, on the other hand… Given it was the White House that ordered it, Ford didn't hold any big hopes of seeing that change any time soon. And forget about getting answers to who or what the tetchy little ragamuffin really was. SQ's Ex-O already had enough nightmares and anxiety attacks as it was, having a truthful accounting of the existence of Lucas Wolenczak was most certainly not amongst his priorities right now. The brat could keep his secrets and depravities to himself; he'd get no contest from Ford.

Exhaling another deep, sorrowful breath at the state of his beloved bridge, the black-skinned male turned away, walking out of the wrecked room, passed the remains of the clamshell doors that had been ripped off their frame and reduced to twisted metallic shreds when Lucas's machine decided to leave and return to its hidey-hole. Nobody still had any idea where that was, by the way, and the runt wan't saying nuttin'… Pasty mangy little albino cur…

Ford mentally washed his hands of it all. The Bush carrier group had sent them about sixty guys to help clean up and repair (renovate) everything to full function; they could do it any way they damn well pleased as far as Jonathan was concerned. The doctors hadn't cleared him for any sort of duty and for once in his entire life, he would take their advice and maybe even ask for some more time off to recover his _'fragile emotional equilibrium'_. He wondered idly if he could manage to bum them out of some leave time on the surface, away from what caused the damned nightmares in the beginning.

 **Post-action reports; Second Officer**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Wednesday 12th of February, 2020; 8:20am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-B, near shuttle hub**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Katherine Hitchcock was standing in the corridor of deck-B, besides the condemned lavatory. She was leaning back against the wall opposite the showering hall's door, head bowed in thought as she waited for the HAZMAT team to come clean up the messy diseased human-shaped piles of gunk that were all that remained of the two mercenaries. They had not died quickly or easily. In fact, their passing must have been hellish. The lack of damage to the washing room seemed to indicate they fell to the floor inert almost as soon as they entered and then the chemical or bio-agent had all its time to work on them. She prayed they were unconscious by that time but doubted that Lucas would have chosen something so merciful as to render someone insensate before it digested them.

That was another kettle of fish all on its own, too.

The youngest person on board had been revealed as the one with the biggest guns and baddest survival skills of them all. None of the adults who were professionals in security or defense could come close to his body count or the sheer inventiveness he put into destroying both the plans of the opponents and their men at the same time. Some of his attacks had been vicious to the point of unfettered cruelty.

She was glad she wasn't in charge of cleaning or rebuilding the bridge. It might be her ship and she was second in line to the _Big Chair_ , but that still wasn't enough to make her go back into that room until it had been disinfected and set to rights. She had no desire to walk around that room as long as each step would result in squishy noises due to the thin all-encompassing layer of reddish organic crud that covered everything in there. You couldn't pay her enough to walk in that place until the Bush group's HAZMAT and the cleaning teams had finished at the very least the basic wash-up and decontamination protocols.

Kathy was thankful for small mercies granted her by the Universe in these dreary days. The paperwork for all this mess was being done by the crew from the Bush or tech-heads coming straight from NCQ so she just had to do an overview for a speedy little verbal report to the captain and her day was done.

Thank God for pill-induced sleep; it was usually dreamless…

Her cabin and bunk beckoned and she was right glad they hadn't been in the line of fire so that nobody had tried to do anything in her living space. Unlike a few officers whose quarters had been ransacked for access codes, key-cards or maybe just for cash, booze, drugs and whatever else the mercs thought that the better paid officers could be hiding in their lodgings.

A pair of idiots had tried to rifle through Lucas's habitat more commonly know as the _Shitpit_. Given that it was in fact located at the bottom of a deep narrow access well with two armored doors blocking it off from the rest of the ship and the usual smells from the gas pipes, overheating power lines and poor ventilation meant that the nickname was pretty natural to come by and rather easy to understand. She had personally seen how much effort Lucas put into trying to aerate and clean the place but to no avail. It was still a deep, dark, dank, stinking pit. No wonder the boy was so aggravated all the time. And all the quips and teasing about _him being shit_ at anything thus the justification for _flushing him down the pipes_ … Some people thought they were funny by bullying and intimidating a child.

Well, those mercs thought the same as they ransacked Lucas's compartment; what's left of them made the place into a true pit full of shit. It was now as messy as the bridge and would need concerted effort with industrial-grade cleaning chemicals to set it to rights. The Bush carrier's HAZMAT were taking care of it after the bridge and med-bay. Until then, Lucas had to lodge in one of the VIP staterooms as per the orders of the White House and NCQ. Given that he would now have a wet bath with toilet / shower / sink, a micro-wave oven and coffee maker inside the room, the young man was rather pleased with the outcome.

Yeah, in the three months he'd been aboard they hadn't cared for him all that well… Is it any wonder that when he had a chance to let loose and scare what few wits they had out of them, that he took that chance with both hands and didn't hesitate? If they had showed just a little bit of appreciation, a minute dram of humanity towards him, things could have come out differently.

Kathy understood his despondent attitude, standoffish behavior and, due to his intellect and multiple competencies, a good part of his sense of superiority. What she couldn't handle was the raw seething rage he carried in his heart and the incomprehensible violence it manifested as when he expressed that anger openly. What kind of family, what harsh life of horror, could a child live to have that much _Wrath_ inside of his soul and be able to visit such abominable cruelties on humans?

Hitchcock raised her head as she heard the HAZMAT team arrive in the corridor. She'd get the low down of the job they had to do and then go to the captain with the morning's overview. After that, she was going back to bed and be dead to the world until dinner tonight. She'd take enough pills to make sure, and the boat could sink while she was knocked out if it wanted to. At least then, she could truly sleep peacefully without fear of nightmares that were really memories she couldn't repress.

 **Post-action** _afterglow_ **… Humph! We meant '** _reports_ **'; Lucas**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Wednesday 12th of February, 2020; 8:32am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, VIP stateroom assigned to Lucas**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

There was at least one human soul ( _mostly, perhaps, he wasn't sure for real anymore…_ ) aboard SeaQuest that had thoroughly enjoyed the eventful bumpy ride of the last week compared to the three months before.

The blond haired teenager was lying on his temporary bed, flat on his back with his legs folded up against the crystal panel that opened onto the Aqua-Tube while his head dangled downwards over the side of the bed. He was mostly upside-down but it was good for him as it increased both the flow and pressure of fresh blood to his head thus boosting his neural chemistry without drugs and increased his mental acuity considerably at the same time for no real effort.

A small, amused snort escaped the boy as he read the text and images projected in the air before his face courtesy of one of his better holographic displays that he had never sold or licensed out to anybody despite the vast marketing potential it had. Sometimes, having the best gear made your life easy but having the only exemplar of something truly exceptional could save your life. And Lucas was very adept at planning the saving of his own skin since nobody on the mudball wanted to even try.

The harsh legal acts and decrees contained in the holo were incredibly amusing to his sense of Justice which was a rather vengeful affair even on his most altruistic days. One could understand how the informations were not the most gentle or forgiving for those involved. The edicts about a certain pudgy admiral's career made for fascinating reading, especially the parts that had filtered accidentally ( _eh, eh, eh!_ ) to the planet's media about a **poor innocent adolescent boy** kept in infect squalor and merciless servitude aboard the UEO flagship as the result of a _'nudge-nudge wink-wink_ ' style of backroom deal between William Noyce and Lawrence Wolenczak. Dear old dad was about to get himself a dose of horse medicine up his ass via the interposition of the _Court of Public Opinion_ which would of course set the politos in motion in several national capitals and then World Power Plant would grind to a screeching halt whilst Lawrence's reputation died an infamous highly publicized demise. And it hadn't cost Lucas a single penny of his hard frauded coins.

 _"Yeah! I rock it like a pro!_ " he thought to himself with a goofy grin on his face making him appear as young and carefree as his age should be for a change.

The orchestration of this entire fiasco was a thing of beauty due to its simplicity; Lucas had not uttered a single lie, falsehood or exaggeration during the whole affair. All his testimonies and reports were strictly factual and each comment about an event that made his situation look unsavory or even abusive was backed by multiple photos and several hundred hours of raw, unedited video so as to not let anyone think he had done a spin job on the facts. No sirree, the facts were as they were; just presented in a slightly oblique way with a bit less brightness, a smidge more contrast and maybe a little blurriness around the odd edges, but nothing that couldn't be explained away as youthful inexperience or lack of savvy in the internal mechanics of the judicial evidenciary processes.

 _Snort!_ – As if!

Lucas was far more experienced and knowledgeable of the internal mechanics of the police, the states' attorneys, the judges and even the prisons of North America and Europe than he would ever feel comfortable admitting in an open forum. Or any forum, even covert ones, come to thing of it… And how that deleterious experience was mis-acquired shall remain at this moment a closely cherished secret to never be shared with anybody not already dead, cremated, and dispersed to the wind. Speaking in front of a gravestone was just asking for somebody to plant a pinhead camera in the funeral monument to spy on your ' _private moments_ ' as Lucas himself had done a few times in his misspent youth…

Shaking his head out of the funnier and more colorful events of his past, the young man tapped a peppy little ditty on the bed with his hands on each side of him as he used eye movements and voice commands to manipulate the holographic interface into switching pages and following lines of investigation that he had set up several months ago when he first **spied** on his father's tentative negotiations with Noyce for his placement to any dangerous war zone duty that the admiral could use his skills for.

Five months ago, Lawrence should not have commanded his kid to fix the WPP computers for free under threat of a beating if he refused. The contract would have been worth about 10 million Euros to any private contractor but Lucas was willing to do it for 9 because it was family asking and would make a good rep for him. Lawrence exploded verbally as he knew for many years now that hitting his son would not end well for himself rather than the child. Anyways, he blew his top and told the teen to work his ass off for a **big absolute zero** or else he'd get sent to a private off-grid reform institute where the men would take turns at beating some obedience, docility and fear into him. Lucas faked being scared, wailed and pleaded and whined like a little bitch PMS'ing something fierce until his dad's ego had been soothed and then he got serious.

High level payback demanded effort, thought, and much planning after all.

Lucas truly repaired the defective computers, but without changing the older or obsolete parts as he had no intention of paying out of his pocket for the material expenditures that would normally have been budgeted in the contract. Lawrence wanted loads of freebies without the responsibility or accounting for it to anybody. He'd get his free stuff all right, but only what was free for Lucas which meant the man-hours, programming and manutentions the boy could do by himself, but absolutely nothing else. After doing the basic cleanup and rewiring, checking for actual damages in the CPU's and stuff, Lucas went to work on debugging the entire WPP network, from the central servers down to each terminal and PAL unit in service on the project.

After three solid months of solitary slave-work, when the whole WPP's information technology campus was spic-and-span, Lucas began hacking it to pieces to find the weaknesses and openings. He infiltrated and penetrated every cybernetic nook and cranny he could find or create. Then, once well installed in his new virtual abode, he passed from _hacking_ to _splicing_.

A hacker just causes damages and may sometimes contact you to sell you back the data he erased or locked with a pirate encryption malware. It was relatively standard daily activity for the average Web denizen. A splicer however never wanted to be seen, heard or even suspected of having interfaced with your network at some point of his life. The mission of the splicer was to find a regular constant data stream like a security camera or automated inventory program and take control of it in such a way that he not only saw the program in action, he accessed real-time its data, images and sounds and could then alter those to fit his needs without the legal user ever knowing that the data had been 'spliced'.

After all, if UPS had a specific package enter its warehouse in Washington DC with a destination address written on it that directed to Boston but that mid-way there a new set of instructions were downloaded to the barcode scanners and treadmills that ferry the packages between trucks at each warehouse, would anybody suspect anything wrong? It could be a very legitimate request from either the sender or the legal receiver. And voila! A parcel had itself a new direction to a new owner without anybody ever knowing about it, especially if the entry, transit and exit logs were falsified correctly.

That is what Lucas did to WPP's official public network as well as the classified military servers and listening posts placed around the aquatic portion of the complex. The teen had spliced into the security cameras' live stream backups to NCQ, the contractors and hired personnel schedules, the human resources management, military forces allotment & scheduling, inventory & procurement, and pretty much every other system of management he could find. He then dug even deeper and set up active live-stream surveillance of his father and several permanent execs of WPP as well as the twenty most important contractors that were allowed to enter the underwater facility to visit Lawrence's private office in the heart of his little fiefdom.

World Power Plant Project still existed today because Lucas didn't have any real reason to shut them down or hold them hostage against his father. What Lucas did do when he heard that not only did his bastard parent not intend to pay him, but in fact he was trying to send him to his death as well, was to set up the type of public vengeance that the Medici's Popes of the Catholic Church would have been proud of calling their own.

He tabulated all the work he did, with pictures, films and video testimonies of credible contractors he had worked alongside of since he could not do everything alone, no matter what his dad thought and external help had been needed for some sectors of the campus. Then he sent the whole kit to his attorneys to make several official reclamations for payments past due, overtime pay, hazard pay, materials custom-ordered and still not paid, etc… He had them lodge the claims as publicly as possible, with press conferences to explain it all, with the UEO cabinet in NCQ, the Pentagon and Capitol in Washington DC, Ottawa, London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and Prague. Lucas quite simply aired out the dirty laundries of both WPP and his family in public in all the capitals of the most important members of the UEO and NATO alliances in full view of the World Press just to turn the knife in the wound.

" _Try hiding from that, daddy dearest…_ "

Daddy was not happy about that. They both got a few new scars when Lawrence forgot himself and tried to lay a beating on his poor beleaguered child. He should have remembered that if Lucas could hit back as soon as he was four years old, being fifteen with a lot more experience and nastiness under his skin would not make him an easier, weaker target. Then again, Lawrence had always been a dimwitted fool, far too imbued of his own self-image to give a damn about reality. And he never learned fast, either…

Anyways, Lucas had seen his father and Noyce not so secretly plan for the **hopefully fatal** ' _disciplinary reformation_ ' of his wayward miscreant self and had reworked his schedules and plans accordingly.

It's incredible what you can cope with when you're not victim to the effect of surprise.

His dad however would be surprised by quite a lot in the coming months… The kid had put on hold all investments into his small personally owned company that manufactured the gaseous holographic displays that Noyce had tried to steal from him twice already. Then he had sold his four houses and three condos through a nice, secretive bank in the Philippines that liked his cybernetic improvements to their network even more than they wanted his money.

It was people like them that bolstered his faith in humanity still being a bunch of grubby, nasty, avaricious predators… And to think his last private tutor at _Stanford's Young Prodigy Program_ had almost made him believe in Humanity having Good and Decency in it… Perish the thought! What would he do in a world of goodness and morality with all the hard-earned skills at organizing crime and committing cyber terror that were his only reliable aptitudes? Sheesh! What else? Should he perhaps use his extensive knowledge of inert and biological chemistry to open a pharmacy and serve the people for free? Hell no! He wan't no charity!

Besides; he'd paid society a high enough price just to be alive; the scars that littered his body were proof enough. If the Good Peoples wanted more they could sign a procurement contract just like the companies that he did business with. If they asked politely, he might even give them a charity rate.

Pursing his lips at the sight of another text, he zoomed in to have a read as the glowing red alert tags on the reporting software's window meant it was about him directly. This one came from a menial fourth-tier lackey inside the UEO cabinet, addressed to Lawrence, about the " **FINAL** **disposal** " of his bothersome son in short delays. They planned to use the coming emergency inspection of SeaQuest to find any and all reasons possible, from charitable concerns to fears of his unstable violent nature, to pull him from the boat and abscond him somewhere that he would never return from.

 _Groan!_ \- These imbeciles truly thought their plan would work! They genuinely thought that nobody in the whole wide world would question the timing and nature of the disappearance of the principal plaintiff and main witness that was central to about a dozen major legal actions in progress in four different countries? Were they born stupid or had they attended a circus trade-school to specialize in self-destructive moronism like clowns whose trick is to get run down by a car and then pop back up with only tire tracks and tears in their clothes?

Ha, well… he'd have to adjust his plans a bit then. And make public a few more juicy details about a lot of thingies he kept under his pillow just for making rainy days even more dreary… Then he had to find himself a good hidey-hole to stay comfy in until he was at least 21 years old and above International Majority, no matter what Lawrence and the fucktards he paid tried to pull. And speaking of fucktards paid by dear old dad, maybe some purging of their accounts into his own much maligned coffers could help re-equilibrate the forces at play in this little blood feud of theirs…

That and he needed to find a way to FedEx the _Engine-of-Pain_ over to WPP for some quality time with his dad's minions. Since he couldn't bring it with him where he was going to make his bolthole, he might as well ' _gift_ ' it to undeserving souls.

" _Mwwuuu ah ah ah! They shall cower in miserable pain-filled humiliation before my almight!_ " the boy thought theatrically inside his head as he began to look over various private heavy cargo shippers of loose morality and dubious credentials that could airlift his precious _widdle baby gurly_ and bring her to grandpa for a parachute airdrop right into the man's morning bowl of cereals.

 **The inspector**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Wednesday 12th of February, 2020; 14:27pm**

 **Aircraft super-carrier G.H.W. Bush; observation balcony behind bridge deck**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

The aged black-skinned male took out a handkerchief and facetiously wiped the sweat from his face, neck and bald head before placing back the dark blue cap on top of his bare scalp. Damn but Australian sunlight was hard on the body's temperature! He was glad to finally be in the theater of operations, if not directly inside the boat yet. At least, now that he was located in the G.H.W. Bush carrier group patrolling 4,000 feet above her, he could keep an ear out for sounds of trouble or impending confrontations from his target.

General 2-stars Abelard Jannon Lincoln III had been a career navy man for thirty-seven years and counting. He was slightly younger than Nathan Bridger, SeaQuest's much vaunted _Maverick of the Seas_ , but he hadn't taken seven years off to mope on an island somewhere off the maps of civilization. That explained why he had made it up to general whilst Bridger was stuck at captain and holding on to that by the skin of old favor's teeth. If it weren't for a few ill-advised old friends from his past still loitering around the Capitol and New Cape Quest, this entire case would never have happened as Noyce would never have had the backing ( _imaginary only, it so happens…_ ) to carry out his several schemes centered around SeaQuest.

Noyce had thought about the boat as a personal pool toy and treated it like a petty noble used his fiefdom. He bought questionable stuff that was supposed to be for the ship's functioning and sold it to the UEO silently while pocketing the difference or stole UEO property from diverse warehouses and drydocks to be sold off secretly then he kept the cash. He regularly used the crew aboard ship to do _'little jobs_ ' for him that profited him personally or a few close friends while telling them to bill it to the UEO's clock. The man even did a ' _secret deal_ ' with Lawrence Wolenczak to house his kid inside the warship in exchange of a fat check without being obliged to give any guarantees about the kid's welfare, living conditions, educational environment or anything at all. The criminal had basically accepted money to dispose of the teenager as if he were toxic garbage that someone wanted to discreetly dump out of sight. Then he compounded his felony by enslaving the kid on the submarine and **wrote orders to the crew allowing them to "do whatever they wanted to keep him obedient and at work"** so he could ' _pay his way aboard like any other man_ '.

Well, things were gonna change!

General Lincoln weren't no fan of Bridger anyways; the man had always been hotheaded, imbued of his own self importance and thought that if he hadn't come up with the technology then it was probably botched and should be set aside or trashed. The captain was, on top of all other things, an unstable character with lackluster reliability who was prone to making grandiose declarations about being the ' _Master of the Boat_ ' **above all Law** , even when docked in his home port in US soil. There were a lot of times when the idiot fool had made declarations in public that should have seen him sanctioned or at least brought in for some re-education about his place in the navy and life at large.

Not that any punishment, correction or even a contrary opinion would ever have had a chance at happening while William A. B. Noyce was still in office to lord over and protect his favorite minion. But things had changed. Noyce had created, quite by his lonesome, a most resplendent clusterfuck of fubar-ness that NOBODY, not even the UEO executive or the pentawhores could hide or sweep under the metaphoric rug. He had let 16 nuclear warheads fall into the hands of terrorists as well as the means to move and deploy them tactically in a matter of a few short hours. If that ship had been able to reach Chinese shores, or Micronesia or one of the Islamic micro-nations in the South-Pacific ocean…

Yeah, the plebes in Washington got cold chills down their spines that day. Noyce's name was mud to DC now and things were gonna get cleaned up. It remains to be seen how far he'd be allowed to look and which names he'd have permission to name in public in his written report. Time and the politics of DC would tell. At least, the European members of the UEO exec were pushing for Noyce and his cronies to be kicked out and court-martialed. They had already begun looking into their familial holdings to seize money and assets to refund the stolen, fenced and damaged materials that the organization of crooks had criminally appropriated. It would all make an incredibly positive change to the atmosphere inside the whole UEO Navy if that were allowed to happen, even just in a limited degree.

A young seaman approached the older sailor, saluted smartly, then waited at attention for permission to speak with his superior.

"General, sir! We have just been told that the two MR shuttles transporting materials and relief crew to SQ have been prepped for launch. You have another 30 minutes to get down to the well-deck or tell the dive boss to find you a slot on a later run."

The veteran officer shook his head and spoke up "This mess has waited too long as it is. I'm gonna be on that boat in 30 minutes even if I'm in a body bag heading for an autopsy table in SQ's belly if that's the only way to get inside of her. Dismissed, crewman."

Lincoln turned back towards the sea, looking over the balcony railing, gazing out at the vast expanse of clear blue water and its innumerable mysteries; the Marianas Trench, the Tonga Trench, the Great Barrier Reef and the jagged crested ridges where the tectonic plates curled upwards to create mountain chains as impressive as the Appalachians… Yes, there were beautiful, benign mysteries beneath these waves. It was his job to see to it that these were the only mysteries left to explore when he finished his investigation of SeaQuest and her crew. The World would not sleep at peace otherwise.

 **The Inquisition is coming**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Wednesday 12th of February, 2020; 15:43pm**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-C, shuttle silos**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

General Lincoln waited patiently for the parking silo to finish its purging cycle. The relief crew had begun climbing out of the top hatch towards the control hub just above the silos on deck-B but the older officer wanted to wait until the shuttle was dry to exit by the side door with the cargo and access deck-C directly. He wanted to reach his assigned temporary office quickly to see if any messages were awaiting his presence. Then he could go settle into his accommodations; a diplomatic stateroom in the VIP guest section of deck-A towards the aft of the ship. One of the perks of his elevated rank was that they placed him on the deck where the maglev cabin was located thus insuring him speedy movement when leaving or returning to the sanctuary of his bed.

The other small mercy he had was that as of the rank of lieutenant he had access to the officer's mess in each ship or base under control of the US Navy, their partners amongst NATO and now the UEO Alliance as well. His first 15 years in the service had been grueling but the ones after that had garnered a few institutional privileges that were worth a lot more than a pay-grade increase. Money got lost, especially in North America and Europe where soldiers were not paid that well but got taxed the same as the rest of the population, despite all the sacrifices and hardships. Lincoln always thought that receiving non-monetary (non-taxable) benefits when one reached the command ranks was a very good way of rewarding the men while not increasing their fiscal and social burdens even worse than their jobs carried.

Abelard was not operating under any illusions here; to the captain and his coterie of adepts he was an openly declared threat as he represented the quasi-certainty of a career-ending report and most possibly a court hearing of some sort later next year. For the mid-level and junior officers, he was like the much vaunted and reviled Catholic Inquisition of yore. A good device that it was necessary to punctually use to clean the system but with the ingrained certitude of going bad if the people employed were not exemplary themselves. Given how corrupt the civilian side of the Justice and court apparatus was in the USA, their fears of the same situation happening with the military side was legitimate. Especially when one considered whom some of Noyce's cronies were and what positions of power and exalted stations they held before their falls. The crewmen, civilian scientists and corporate contractors would smile politely at his face while scorning him at his back when he was out of earshot. They would feel he was just gumming up the works and keeping them from doing the necessities of their jobs and contracts properly.

The veteran sailor took a deep, calming breath as he watched the water level rapidly decrease through the view port built into the side door of the shuttle. He was very thankful indeed for the secured diplomatic stateroom to sleep safely, and even more for the officer's mess where he could eat without feeling the glares and passive-aggressive humor of the crew aimed at him nonstop. " _Small daily miracles are how Faith in God and Man are built_ " his grand-mother used to tell him; she was right, he knew that now. He just needed to remind himself every hour or so to help keep his temper in check and act civilly towards one of the lowest class of under-achieving fools he'd ever seen at work.

As the lights in the door frame changed from red to green, he heard the hydraulics hiss and strain, lifting the steel-alloy plate upwards whilst the last small rivulets of sea water sluiced down from the valve's lower edge as it rose into its housing. General Lincoln was not impressed to see the captain and chief of security waiting for him on the steel-grate catwalk that surrounded the shuttle inside the silo. They had obviously managed to divine his intentions and place themselves to intercept him before he could even set foot aboard properly. Well, they would have a nasty surprise then. Abelard had always viscerally despised surprises, especially during an audit or full-panel investigation like this one and wasn't shy about making it known.

"General Lincoln. Welcome aboard." Spoke Bridger rather blithely with a slow, pompous salute that seemed strained. Crocker at least saluted like he meant it, not as if his arm had been bent unnaturally against his will.

"Your people don't listen well or have insubordination taught them the moment they set foot aboard, don't they captain?" the senior officer commented tartly as he joined his hands before his belt buckle, fingers interlaced. The fact he had not returned the ship's master's salute was noted by everybody around and their facial expressions were quite revealing. He noted two crewmen with whom he would have a long chat behind closed armored doors and work to insure their protection. The subconscious looks of relief and approval they sent his way were indicative of several problems that needed addressed R-F-N. Nobody was that satisfied and relieved to see his boat's captain taken down in flames like that unless the crew was considering quitting the Navy, abandoning post AWOL or flat-out mutiny.

Nathan Bridger didn't react to Lincoln's pronouncement. He just stood still with his hands clasped behind his back wearing the face of somebody who had to call the plumber to unclog his toilet pipes, not a man facing possible tribunal and the end of his career prospects in anything government related. This meant that either he wasn't taken seriously or Bridger had already come to terms with the end in sight and had emotionally detached from events to protect his mind when the papers got signed.

"I specifically told your comms officer that I didn't want a parade or any sort of reception, not even the protocollary handshake we're supposed to have. Were you not told? Why have you _chosen_ to disregard my orders?" the general asked in a sarcastic, caustic tone of voice. His eyes were squinted and his lips pursed into a thin, severe line as he glared at Bridger, daring him to have any excuse validating his bypassing such a basic direct order from a superior.

Captain Bridger seemed to grind his teeth before answering in low, measured tones that fit a subordinate giving report to his superior in rank. It looked artificial and felt strained, as if the man was making a conscious effort to present himself differently than what he normally would be. "We were informed by the UEO Cabinet that I was to be available to you 24 / 7, at your convenience and by your determination alone, for as long as you are aboard to investigate. I was commanded by the Chairman of the Joint-Chiefs to give you the print-out of the message in person along a copy of my schedule for the coming seven days. I was also ordered to book two hours every evening for your use in the official investigation as you would want to verify and validate your daily observations immediately upon making them. As such, sir, here are the documents required and my person reporting to you as ordered."

Lincoln could understand the man's position and emotional state upon hearing that. Some nitwit in the White House or UEO cabinet had talked out of his station and whispered ideas into the ears of the Joint-Chiefs and the Defense secretaries. That was a big No-No as it eroded the legitimacy of his investigation by politicizing the process so that it looked like it was remote controlled by the junior office clerks and aide-de-camps to the Staff Officers rather than the people holding the titles themselves. This could muddy the waters and let people perceive improper arrangements of power, influence and management of protocols and rules that should never happen in the Armed Services. If news spread out too much, it would kill morale just as fast as Noyce's idiocy had done. He needed to respond fast and hard to stabilize the mess.

"Well then, captain Bridger; let me set your mind at ease. I don't need that much of your time at all. Maybe an hour or two every three days should suffice for the basics. I will need a long stretch of about three to five hours when we do the individual interview to establish the tally of your tenure to date. Perhaps even a last meeting to go over the draft of my findings just so I don't forget anything. Otherwise my presence aboard should not be so disruptive. Whomever it was in DC or NCQ that issued this order will be addressed; they spoke out of their station and made it look like they command my methods and findings before any investigating happens. It's exactly that type of political interference that damages the integrity and reputation of a judicial process and I won't stand for it."

General Lincoln decided to mend fences by returning Bridger his formal salute properly before continuing with his view of things. "I know your ship is wounded and several key crewmen are walking wounded. I plan to visit the wrecked areas and talk to the wounded first so your healthy people can get on as much as possible with the repairs and daily affairs. I see no need to burden you with an extra obstruction that would serve no purpose but to bolster my ego. And for the record, sir, I have those two stars on my shoulder boards for a reason; stoking my ego will take more than salutes and clearing a room when I go in. I plan to run this audit openly and fairly, while being available to officers, crewmen and contractors alike during the procedure. I have never been accused of partiality or favoritism during my audits gentlemen; it won't start here."

Bridger seemed to mull the words while Crocker actually let some stress bleed out of his posture, becoming relaxed enough to nod in agreement towards the general. The inspector focused on Bridger as this man was both central to the ship and the investigation. This older male was the linchpin by which would be decided how aggressive the process was and whether he needed to call the Bush Group to send in full-time security marines to back him up against overtly recalcitrant sailors.

Clearing his throat noisily, Nathan made a vague gesture with his right hand, now placing the other behind his back. Looking at the superior officer in front of him with far less than admiration or deference, the veteran let out the ugly truth they all knew but kept quiet about. "We can stop being coy General; we aren't blushing virgins, it doesn't look cute on us anymore. We both know full well that the reason you are here is to ascertain the depths of Noyce's cronyism aboard and just how damaged the integrity and morality of the crew is. Alternately, you are tasked with finding the evidence needed to justify dragging me and others to a court martial with the aim of at least discharging me from the navy under a cloud of suspicion, if not actually convincing the judging panel of putting me in jail. Let me put your mind at ease. I have already spoken to the President in Washington DC; he has accepted my **conditional honorable resignation** , to become effective upon completion of both the repairs and crew changes. The status of your audit will not bear upon this decision; this was guaranteed to me by the Pentagon and UEO executive cabinet. So, feel free to poke stuff and question people. It will take a miracle to change the state of affairs."

The general noted the stunned look on the chief of security and garnered that Bridger had not told anybody yet. He probably had confirmation just before Abelard set foot aboard. Yes, this changed things, in the way of making them much easier. After all, with the captain already lame and heading out the door, the rest of the officers and crew would be far less gregarious and less prone to defend the man or come up with fabricated explanations to justify situations that should not have happened. It would make his job not only faster but also safer. Auditors could have _accidents_ when a captain wanted to fight tooth and nail to keep his command.

 **This neighborhood is blighted**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Wednesday 12th of February, 2020; 17:12pm**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, VIP stateroom**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

General Lincoln was well pleased with the VIP stateroom; it matched what he expected from a ship of the Quest's class and status as the flagship of the fleet. The lavatory was better than what they had in the same rooms on aircraft carriers, which was surprising considering the size difference and the fact subs were always more compact and economical about all manners of space saving methodologies that would make cruise line ships look wastefully oversized. Besides having a full bathtub with actual water instead of only the ionic shower he expected, the room also had a microwave oven, two-hob hot-plate and a small coffee maker with the usual unbreakable steel 12 cup thermal carafe. Most boats tended to avoid glass and the thinner plastics in case of accidents; in the military it was to avoid these items turning to flying shrapnel by the shock waves from gun shells, missiles or a floating mine.

 _To each his own methods and necessities_ , as the saying went.

Still, the comfort and space were nice, especially the privacy afforded by the heavy blast-proof door with the impressive locking device in the handle. Bridger's design for the rotating all-in-one cylindrical lock-cum-handle was very astute for the type of watertight, jimmy-proof needs of a submarine. It was a pity it was so expensive to manufacture, there were plenty of ships and secured bases that could use this on their doors. But, for all the trouble she gave the navy, the SeaQuest was a well designed, well built boat and she seemed to have been well maintained by her diverse crews along the almost 15 years of service. Even the corridors and common areas looked to be cleaned regularly and exhibited minimal wear.

Placing his carry-on bag on the small desk, the older man took out the navy issued laptop computer and its case of attached devices. He plugged in the wired mouse and external hard drive then looked around the wall for the sockets. Finding the fixture, he flipped open the safety caps and plugged the laptop's power cord and network cable. Once done with the setup, he pushed the power button then started removing his neck tie and jacket. He planned to get comfortable, put the initial case files and damage reports in order before going for a good long dinner in the officers' mess. All his plans had him begin the actual work processes tomorrow after a good long sleep to recover from the two days of travels and synchronizing his biology to the ship's clock.

As the general began unpacking his duffel bag for what would be at least a two week stay, perhaps three, he heard the portable station beep and whine in protest. Looking at it, he saw that a weird icon was now present on the screen, taking almost 90% of the surface, even covering the regular apps and files he kept on the virtual desktop. The odd image had been visible only about six seconds before it disappeared and a small white rectangle replaced it, odd green text scrolling in it. It looked like a custom made version of DOS or another machine-like programming system.

The laptop suddenly shut down on its own before rebooting again, everything seeming automatic at this point. When the desktop stabilized, the elder black male could see three new application icons on the lower left corner of the monitor. None were familiar but still easy to identify. One was the logo of SeaQuest, the outlined triangle with a hammerhead shark swimming through it. The second was a drawing of an old free-standing safe on legs like in the 1800's with a bull's horned head perched atop. The third icon was almost as easy to recognize: an outline of a deformed human head and neck with a large bolt coming out of the neck on each side and a pair of miniature parabolic antennae coming out from the upper tips of the ears.

A skeletal minotaur keeping stuff and an updated Frankenstein effigy? Taking out the paper files he carried for the mission, he quickly rifled the sheets until he got the one he wanted; Wolenczak. Inside he flipped the pages until he got the list of commercial products the young man had made and sold in the course of his rather prolific short life. There they were.

 _Minotaurus Invitae_ , the keeper of digital coffers and monetary transactions. A program that even the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had purchased hefty subscriptions for. The system was still to date seen as the _nec plus ultra_ of active cybernetic security and encryption for confidential or classified data vaults and bank management. Several high-class private hospitals had purchased the software to keep, manage and update with partner clinics the files of their shared upper crust patients. With the value of health information on the black market, and in the open one as well, the subscription price didn't seem that much compared to losing some of the big-wigs on the customer list.

The other was simply **Frankenbotten** , _the Man Made of Many Broken Parts_ ; a specialty cybernetic spyware conceived to infiltrate a system and then hunt, analyze and hijack all other malware, spyware and viruses already in it or to come afterwards. It was basically a virtual fortress with dogs and guards that you deploy in one device and then it spreads at each new contact, by wire or freewave. This system was an exclusive propriety of Lucas Wolenczak thru his company, Wolenbahn Inc by the subaltern division, a nameless numbered incorporation, that held all softwares.

The SQ logo was supposed to represent a simple little app that identified the device as being an authorized subjunct peripheral of the network for the building or ship where it was. It's presence on the desktop meant that the ship had scanned the machine and accepted the codes in the app's client-module in the laptop thus automatically connecting the portable to the ship's mainframe and setting a few things to interface with the boat systems better. Autoconfig and Presets, some of the cheapest but most time saving apps needed in a place like SeaQuest where there was a lot of traffic coming and going from the boat for a lot of reasons. The entire network of PAL devices could not work without this largish commercial version of the program running silently in the servers.

It also proved that contrarily to all rumors, Lucas Wolenczak had indeed been collaborating to a much greater extent than told to him at his briefing pre-mission. These programs were not cheap and they took time and effort to customize the servers to work properly on them, followed by about a hundred hours of analytics and optimization. Since it was not written anywhere in the ship's budget books or inventory manifests that these programs were installed and preponderant in the network over the standard UEO system, then someone obviously lied or was kept ignorant.

Knowing where the signature to have Wolenczak aboard despite his age and not having a contract came from, the general thought wisely that some people like Noyce were bamboozled whilst others were just kept in the dark. It also meant that the kid was aware of everything in his portable and could do what ever he wanted with it at any moment of his choosing.

 **So much for security, let alone confidentiality.**

At least they knew which side the _little bad luck charm_ was on. In principle. Abelard would not put money on it, but the info came from DC, not New Cape Quest, so he was inclined to wait and see. If his source had been NCQ, he'd have refused the mission. There was a stench around Andrea Dre that wasn't just the high-priced French toilet water she spritzed herself with under the guise of perfume.

Rumor around the General Accounting Office and the Office of Procurement was that Dre knew about Noyce keeping the kid aboard without conditions or lawful treatment while getting a fat check from the kid's father to make him disappear. Same rumor had it she allowed it to happen in exchange for data and state secrets of the USA that the New Zealand born woman should never have known about, let alone have the paper in her hands.

That said rumors were being tracked by the CIA's _foreign diplomats analytics division_ , the NSA _anti-treason squad_ , the FBI's _foreign territory crimes squad_ , the NCIS _data-breach team_ and the US Navy Intelligence meant that General Lincoln would never trust or accept anything out of that zealy slut's office without wearing a hazmat suit and having a dozen cameras around to film it all. No sense in having his own reputation and dignity questioned on the account of a politician, never you mind a foreign one with the dodgy contacts and seedy backers that Dre had.

Having made his mind up, the general finished unpacking and moved to the lavatory to take a real hot water shower before switching out to his normal day uniform in preparation for an informal evening. Everything else could wait until the morning.

As he partially closed the bathroom door, the laptop monitor flashed and that weird image took over the entire screen for a second, the large representation of a cruelly curved blue beak surrounded by many green and blue wiry appendages covered in even crueler barbs with two round yellow eyes surmounting the whole.

The laptop went to sleep mode after sending an automated acknowledgment to its new master, electronically vowing discreet invisible obedience to its cybernetic overlord. And the general would never find out. No one would ever find out. The digital Krachen had extended one of its innumerable alphanumeric limbs to grasp a new victim into its cold hold, bringing it before its baleful virtual gaze, then chose to put it aside for later. While always eternally hungry and never merciful, the Krachen was wise and frightfully intelligent in its own inhuman ways; it knew how to hoard resources for when they were best exploited and when they had expired and could be consumed.

Either way, the **Beast** would feast, thrive and rule. There was no other way but Death, and the Great Ending had not been foretold yet. It would come, as to all things, but not yet.

So now the new electronic minion would sleep, watching and listening, dutifully reporting even as it seemed inert, its nominal owner never the wiser.

 **Dinner amongst doubts**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Wednesday 12th of February, 2020; 18:00pm**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-B, officers' mess**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

General Lincoln was finishing the orderly piling of paper files into neat stacks as was his habit when preparing his work space for a prolonged audit. The incoming and outgoing messages, the individual service jackets, then the accumulated evidences that were newly discovered, under review, accepted as provably valid and those rejected. At the utmost end of the line of stacks were the expanding folders containing each judicial case considered by the JAG and DOJ that were to be examined to determine if there was or not a valid reason to proceed with charges, an out-of-court settlement or abandoning procedures altogether.

Now that his preliminaries were done, the veteran sailor sighed in satisfaction that he wasn't missing anything and his piles were matched by the digital backups, showing clearly that at this point of the job, no one had tried to destroy evidence or steal the hard copy to derail the process. The audit was young and there was still plenty of time to make several messes before the end of the line.

He began an extra pile which he placed unobtrusively on a chair which was then pushed back to the table so that the seat and the files were hidden beneath the tablecloth, out of direct sight. This was the stack of crew complaints, denunciations and _Whistle-blower Protection Law_ formularies that he had found slid into the mailbox of his temporary office on deck-C. Already 13 people had come forward before even knowing who the inspector would be or what credibility and reliability he had. That was a bad sign for Bridger's tenure and his administration that so many wanted to talk before even getting any guarantees of safety or support.

 **No, it didn't look good at all.**

Emitting another low sigh, shaking his head at what he had read on those complaints, the man had already split the stack into two piles; the genuine complaints and the empty bitchings. The unfortunate reality of having so many civilian contractors permanently posted aboard a full-service military ship declared combat-enabled was that a lot of civvies didn't get the point that it was first and foremost a combatant vessel, a Search & Rescue ship second and an R & D ship third. A lot of guys representing some of the big companies aboard were not used to being told that their corporate name, money, titles and scientific community credentials had no value against pirates or rogue nations firing torpedoes and machine guns at the boat.

Many had very bad reactions to realizing they were aboard a real, in-service ship-of-war with the military code in full force even unto them. Well, tough! Sucks to be them. If they thought this assignment was a vacation on the sunny beaches of Australia, they should have booked a US Air flight instead. Old Abelard would not hold their hands and let them cry foul against the ship's crew just because they were homesick, scared to death of how close combat came to them or because they absolutely wanted to show their power and influence by writing up false accusations just to get attention they mistakenly thought should go to them.

Now finished for real, the two-star general put on his ball cap with the US Navy – GAO logos on its front, adjusted his neck tie and made sure he had all his keys, cards and PAL before marching out the cabin door towards the mess. He locked the door and shook it twice to make certain the cylinder lock had indeed engaged properly before making his way to his destination.

Since the officers' mess was on deck-B along with the galley and regular mess hall, he had to go down one set of stairs and then let his nose guide him to the grub. Easy enough, even on a barge the size of SeaQuest. The obvious color-contrasting guidance panels stuck to the walls at corridor junctions and the entry of important rooms helped a lot too.

After barely 5 minutes, Abelard was climbing down one of the wide staircases that were specific to the Quest design. The thing was easy to walk with wide, deep steps leaving plenty of space for even big feet like his own whilst the riser height was just a bit less than the tight sharply elevated stairs in the regular stairs on other ships which were more like angled ladders than actual stairs.

As the older black male turned the elbow on the staircase plateau between deck A and B, he saw a slightly built shape clad in pale blue topped with golden hair walk by the stairway entrance, walking along deck-B towards the mess area. Having just had a first glimpse of the resident super hacker and boy of infinite mysteries, Abelard decided to give himself a little burst of speed to catch up to the kid.

As he came onto deck-B and turned towards Lucas, he saw the boy's movement had been stopped by the presence of two young officers, lieutenants by the badges on their blue shirts, who seemed to be friendly towards the kid. Moderating his pace, the general approached silently, hoping to intercept a few words before they noticed him.

No such luck; all three were speaking fluently in Spanish, a tongue the general didn't use.

As he came upon them, the two officers straightened and saluted as per protocol while the teenager turned around to face him, keeping his hands in his pockets and a careful blandly neutral look on his face. Abelard had seen this look many times during his career in the General Accounting Office of the US Navy; ' _the politician's glass wall_ ' _._ Invisible to the untrained eye, it was the thick solid barrier that all those used to dealing with multiple cultures and personality types placed between themselves and the exterior world to protect their core identity without bothering to play _social chameleon_ like the government ambassadors or company bosses had to do.

To see a 16 year old kid with such an elaborately crafted and strongly maintained façade was unnerving as it spoke of many hundreds of hours of assiduous practice to reach this proficiency at stowing and hiding emotions and inner thoughts. It also made Abelard wince internally behind his own polite mask. Normally, when kids this young had this thick and bland a mask, it meant they had been systematically tortured and exploited and this was the only way they had managed to hide from the tormentors just how weak and damaged the child had become at their hands. No, this didn't look good at all.

General Lincoln entered the officers' mess with pursed lips and squinted eyes aimed at the backs of the two lieutenants and teenager who continued a few paces further to the public mess hall for their own meal and recreation with friends. Abelard wondered idly how many of the crew had been friends with the boy before Shraeder's invasion and how many would publicly claim the same now. It would be interesting to compare the two lists, just to see the boy's social influence as well as the honesty and fear of the responders. And yes, the general was being quite sarcastic in his evaluation of how many people would now flock to Wolenczak's banner with claims of support and friendship. He also doubted the kid was so inexperienced or untried by life as to accept them on their word alone.

Some people would be getting rude wake-up calls soon.

Entering the officers' mess, the two-stars took advantage that it was yet empty to have a look around to observe the smaller details in the craftsmanship. He was again impressed by how livable and well appointed the common areas of the boat were. Bridger's design had managed to squeeze usable space out of the structure in ways that conventional naval architects were probably weeping about. The wide rectangular room had three eight-seat tables reserved each for a specific officer and twelve two-seat tables open to the other officers allowed inside the controlled space. The large tables for the captain, chief of medicine and chief engineer were clearly identified as such with a centerpiece referring to the job occupied by the space's titular.

Around the outer perimeter of the room were thickly padded benches with tall backrests and no armrests or place separations, each was four seats wide. These were meant in case the junior officers were needed in the room for a classified meeting; in that case a set of folding tables were brought in and positioned in front of the people using these ' _back-seats_ '. Another use for these benches was as temporary cot in case an officer became ill or nauseous during his meal. Sometimes, a VIP guest preferred to have a place with room to spread his legs while enjoying a simple drink or sandwich between meetings. No other ship in the fleet had plush furniture like this.

The setup was unique to SeaQuest in other ways. There was a crystal-panel fronted bar containing tightly controlled bottles of diverse alcohols and the upper class coffee, tea and chocolate drink mixes to be used with the massive Italian espresso machine fit for a 5-star hotel's bar. Another thing was the tableware; all made of the same high quality titanium alloy as the ship's structure and inner hull, bearing the outline-triangle with hammer-shark swimming through. The imitation stained-glass shades for the ceiling lights were actually made of the same crystal as the ship's view-ports and Aqua-Tube windows, just like the bar's transparent panels.

Yes, this room spoke of elegance, refinement and just a touch of snobbery, like in the days of the tall ships when the distinction between cabin boy, sailor, navy man, officer, gentleman and Lord was still known even by the common man in the streets. Nathan Bridger had managed to build a fine Grand Lady, despite the jerk-wads in DC having cut the budget so much that 2 whole levels and 500 feet of the original design's length were scratched off the blueprints. What a boat she would have been at those dimensions!

Sighing about ' _what could have been_ ', the old sailor made his way to a small two-seat table near the entry of the kitchen shared with the regular mess. As he sat down, he noted another little bonus of this room and its better setup: on the table was an embedded PAL system dedicated to contacting the galley to ask for service, just like in luxury hotels in NCQ. Bridger really had been ahead of his time.

After ringing the galley, Abelard took off his ball cap and laid it on the table, on the far side to keep his place-mat clear. The crewman serving as waiter came in and, to his credit, didn't react at all at seeing the much dreaded ' _Inquisitor_ ' was his first client of the evening.

A quick polite exchange followed about the day's soup and chef's choice with a paper menu reserved for the officers' service in case the general wanted something more elaborate. A lot of navy men preferred to eat small light breakfasts and lunches with a copious dinner that they would have all evening to digest quietly. Lincoln didn't follow that tradition because he'd actually suffered from ' _bad schedule getting worse syndrome_ ' all his time in the General Accounting Office; he learned to eat a good meal when he had time to sit as he would not be able to rest and enjoy his food the next five or seven times.

The auditor was done with his soup already when the corridor door opened and let in the ship's chief of security with his arms full of data-pads and paper files. He made for the table reserved for the chief engineer and dumped his burden noisily, followed by his ball cap and an explosive exhale of anxiety and stress. Sitting down in the chair normally reserved for Kathy Hitchcock, Crocker pinged the galley and began ordering the lesser black plague (paperwork) that he was saddled with.

After-action reports with recommendations from just about everybody aboard on how to improve security, specifically the hardening of departments against shipboard intrusions or spying. _Snort!_ Most of these were so childish or far-fetched that Crocker knew that the resident teenager would laugh himself silly if he ever saw them. Manilow was also willing to bet that the pasty little coon-spawn would be able to breeze through any of those so-called ' _increases of safety_ ' as if they weren't in place.

Some people really should stick to their assigned jobs and let the pros handle the rest.

 **Snort!** \- Like that was gonna happen when politics were involved!

Roughly passing a weary hand through his short-cropped gray hair, Crocker raised his head to look around and saw that he was alone with a two-star. _Grrreat_! Just his dumb luck!

"General, sir; didn't see you there… How's your embarkation to date? Hope the old gal has'na shaken you too much?" spoke Manilow in as polite a tone as he could manage without seeming a suck-up.

Abelard gestured vaguely with his left hand, the right one having a piece of buttered bread roll on its way to his mouth. After chewing his bread, the general answered verbally in a relaxed manner. "Nothing that doesn't happen on any ship I board. Finding the lay of corridors, getting used to how she's designed and built, where the common areas are… It's pretty much routine after twenty years in the GAO doing audits in ships while they float at large. The inquests and verifications can't stop or we'd get conned daily by grifters and traitors, but the actual _military_ part of the service can't stop either. So this is the life for those of us in that particular branch of the navy. How's your day been, chief? You seemed like a man who just learned that instead of retiring next year they gave you a promotion without asking your opinion."

Crocker laughed out at that one. It wasn't far from the truth of the matter. "Well, the paper pushers in DC are wetting themselves at the idea of Nathan going back to his island cuz they havn'a got a replacement captain for the boat. Ford is a good Ex-O, but not experienced enough and not the character to handle the diplomatic burdens of SQ on a bad year like this one is shaping up to become. Han… Hitchcock is decent but more of a tech-head than captain material yet. She'd be a good diplomat though, but not enough backbone to wrangle the scientists and politos into manageable lines. I'm gonna retire next year an'nobody saying otherwise! That's it for those we have aboard; if NCQ had candidates stashed up Andrea Dre's sleeve, they not saying to us. So… Panic at the top…"

The black-skinned veteran nodded and responded "You have the gist of it. Bridger falling on his sword will spare him a court martial and embarrassment, but I don't think that he was ever really at risk of dismissal or losing rank. He's needed in charge of this damn hull; nobody else we have on hand is competent enough or has the spine to deal with the diversity of crew and passengers she's saddled with all year long now that we are renting lab space to civilian companies."

Crocker snorted as the waiter came with the general's salad appetizer and his own soup. "A'n Lucas, too! Most candidates the **captaincy promotion committee** in DC has in line don't have a clue how to cope with that tetchy little tailless rat! Ta't will knock a lot of wannabees out of contention now!" the security chief added before taking a first spoonful of soup.

General Lincoln was interested by the waiter's reaction when Crocker openly mentioned Wolenczak's importance in the process of choosing the ship's next master. The young man had frozen for a second then smirked rather nastily while nodding his head in agreement to the older officer's opinion. Abelard silently took note of the young crewman's name on a small paper notepad once he was gone back into the galley and the door closed.

Whatever opinion Crocker had about his presence, Abelard thought the man would speak plainly and truthfully; his coming retirement had been protected by Washington just like Bridger's sudden departure so the man had no incentive to lie. All the people he could want to protect were already better shielded than he could do and were slated to leave either after the audit or end their career honorably at the end of the present tour. No, the general didn't see any problems coming from the security department.

The corridor door opened again, admitting the person he wanted to speak the most after the captain: doctor Kristen Judith Westphalen, ship's chief of medicine for both humans and animals. She had been chosen specifically because of the importance of the **dolphin language project** as well as the large number of civvies working with live animals to find miraculous health cures. Her multiple specialties covered human medicine, veterinary medicine, biochemistry, genetics and exobiology. She had enough doctorates and masteries to use them as wallpaper to cover all her office and have a few spares for her quarters too. Her presence aboard was indicative of the mental, scientific and social caliber needed to even be considered for a berth in SeaQuest.

She walked into the officers' mess escorted by her close subordinate, doctor Joseph Isai Levine, a field-medic from the Israeli Defense Force. The elderly gentleman with the small paunch, silvery beard and vastly receded hairline specialized in human medicine, traumatology, urgentology and pediatric war injuries and was another mental heavy weight to contend with. Both were discussing the health of the crew that had been caught in the mess hall during the mini-riot and then the war-drone attack. Several would need prolonged care before they could even consider being released from hospital. Others were damned lucky to still be alive; the war-drone had avoided hitting the Quest's people but the terrorists hadn't been so finicky about shooting around in a blind panic as they tried desperately to kill off the murderous machinery.

The two medics stopped in their tracks and blinked in synch at the general, the gears in their heads turning at high speed as they processed the significance of his presence aboard so fast after the events. A quick little salute and wave later and both medics were ensconced at the chief-of-medicine's large table, menus in hand, completely severed from the rest of the world. Abelard wasn't worried about them as their profiles told him they would be amongst the most cooperative members of the crew when he did the health evaluations and individual interviews.

Both doctors and several of the med-bay staff had lodged a formal protest with UEO executive cabinet, the White House and the DCFS in Washington DC about the glaring illegalities and flagrant irregularities in the presence and treatment of Lucas Wolenczak. Neither of the health-care professionals really wanted to kick out the boy. They just wanted to see him given a fair hiring contract with the same pay, benefits and protections as any other civilian with the same type of job would have received.

Westphalen's early reports about the kid's performance from the month they were in drydock finishing up the preps for the tour were practically glowing with praise. She did comment on his preternatural shyness and self-contained personality, but it didn't seem to hinder his social skills or capacity to relate with coworkers during group tasks. Westphalen even detailed how he seemed to always subconsciously slide into the roles of mediator and motivator for any group he was assigned to.

Levine had seen the kid for health reasons; he had injuries that happened before coming to the ship that had only ever been tended to with the most basic level of professional care. In fact, the jewish man's evaluation was that the boy's father had compounded violence and trauma inflicted on the child in the name of ' _paternal corrections_ ' by refusing any medical help after he had assaulted him. Some of the injuries described were not only gruesome to see but could also have been life-threatening or at least severely debilitating if not treated rapidly before scarring or bone growth happened the wrong way.

Yes, the two-star general thought; those doctors and their people in med-bay would be a treasure trove of informations, especially on how to approach Lucas without triggering another episode of ' _Let's paint the corridors red with human mush_ '. At least, by all accounts, the kid didn't seem prone to outbursts, tantrums or random behaviors that could negatively affect the ship's functions or performance.

He would know more tomorrow when he went through the casualty and injury lists with the medics and security chief at morning tea.

The noise level in the public mess hall was at an all time low for dinner rush as people were careful to keep their conversations quietly to their own tables whilst giving discrete looks at the four-seat place where Lucas, Ortiz and O'Neil were eating. The three males were either completely clueless about the kid's presence's impact on the crowd or they were playing it mum to see who would do what first.

The two officers had the right, as bridge crew Alpha-shift, to use the officers' mess but Lucas had never been invited nor was it indicated if he would be tolerated. So, since they wanted to eat with their younger friend to ascertain his health and emotional welfare following the invasion, the adult men had decided to eat with the plebes tonight. It would be less stressful too, seeing as the GAO auditor had chosen the OM for his own meal. No need to place themselves in the man's crosshairs just yet.

Miguel and Timothy were discussing some rumors they had heard out of the Bush carrier group's relief crew about putting the Quest at anchor in Sidney for some weeks until the hull integrity and computer security could be truly validated by outside experts. Inane scuttlebutt talk that was easy to chew and wouldn't affect digestion on top of all the stress and anxiety about a lot of their futures given the levels of anger and frustration felt by the Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff in Washington DC these days.

Lucas paid the barest attention to his tablemates' speech as he knew the real low-down from DC due to his many human contacts and several thousand zombie bots that wiretapped and data-mined the government for anything relating to his situation and well-being. The guys' jobs were safe, if maybe in line for a transfer to another ship. The p _entawhores_ were worried that too many people with contacts to Nathan Bridger by having attended Naval Academy with his son Robert getting stationed on the same ship could create a clique whose loyalty to the USA and UEO would be questionable. As such, there was a debate amongst the self-styled _'elite planners_ ' in DC about how to split up the top officers without damaging the SeaQuest's efficiency too much so she could endure until better people could be vetted and placed aboard.

Lucas may be young and lacking in experience in several areas of life but power plays and **doggish behavior** he knew full well. The politos were scared stiff about just how much high-caliber potential had been agglomerated inside of one single ship and they feared that they had lost what little control they dreamed they had. Do note that these so-called ' _elite planners_ ' were in fact aide-de-camps, junior office clerks and external political attaches of a few wannabee senators. Any control they thought they had to begin with had never been anywhere but in their dreams. The real decision-makers, those with the real senior positions, titled offices and executive authority knew full well just how tight a hold they had on SeaQuest and her potential. They weren't the ones panicking or begging ( _mewling like babies_ ) for changes and bringing the ship to heel.

Lucas picked idly at the dregs of his plate. The rather good pork souvlaki brochettes, scalloped potatoes, rice and salad had filled him up a lot more than he was used to eating in one meal. On an ordinary day, he would have been lucky to receive half of that plate to feed him for the entire 24 hour period so his stomach was still unused to all the foodstuffs. He himself still wasn't used to having the right to just walk up to the counter and serve himself from the same pans as everybody else whatever his body needed to stay healthy and grow properly for a change. He could now eat fresh tasty meals that weren't coming out of a ' _dog food_ ' can with a _Dollar Store_ logo on it. That had to count for _something_ in a young life like his, didn't it?

Taking up his ever-present solid steel thermal mug of coffee, the teenager gazed lazily around the mess hall, trying to figure out from whom the next threat to his health would come. Not that anybody would try anything for a good long while. The visually stunning display of garish red spread out over the bridge deck's remaining structures had quite graphically warned everybody about the consequences of going against his health and welfare. Only the stupid or recently transferred would try something for now and unfortunately there was rarely a shortage of either in his life.

Dragging his attention back to his two friends ( _they were that, weren't they?_ ) the adolescent poked his long index at Miguel's forearm and asked playfully "Hey, you… Weren't you due on the bridge for the evening shift today?" His shit-eating grin told the men he was well aware of just how misplaced his sense of humor was.

Migs made a weird face, pouted lips and wide eyed with a vigorous negative shake of the head. "Na-han man! Not until the Bush HAZMAT team is done! Nobody gettin' in the room but the captain, Ford and Hitchcock to see what's happening and how fast the place will be livable again. Nobody else got clearance to access it. Nobody wants to either. So, I have to do my evening shift in Engineering, at the back-up command node. Have to leave in about… Another twenty minutes and I'm okay."

Tim smiled wanly at his young friend and spoke calmly; not feeling threatened or put out by the boy's truly odd character since he had made his acquaintance. "Sorry kiddo, you're stuck with me alone tonight. Guess we won't be playing poker all that much; it's kinda boring just two guys. A game of Monopoly could be fun." The comms chief gave a funny little smirk of his own before completing his offer with gallows humor of his own: "Unless you'd prefer a game of Clue. Some guys have cobbled up a variation of the board with the SeaQuest and dependent craft instead of a manor house with a few sheds and garden pond. In that case I would play as the Librarian, you could take the Pharmacist. Or the Mechanic. Both fit you."

Ortiz was giving his colleague lieutenant a truly evil eye while Lucas started wheezing, holding his chest with both arms as he spasmed silently. It took almost a minute before the two adults realized he was actually laughing in genuine mirth but without emitting a single sound. W-T-F? What in Bloody Blue Blazes had happened to the kid in his childhood that he would have habits like that? It wasn't the first time the two LT's had seen Lucas do something in morbid silence when others would have made enough noise to rouse the entire boat. It wasn't a good sign, but try as they could, the boy rarely if ever confided in anybody about his home or school life before coming aboard.

Exchanging a forlorn look with O'Neil, Miguel stood up to go dump his tray in the service area before going out for his late shift. Timothy could escort Lucas back to deck-A's VIP area and maybe spend some one-on-one time with him. Miguel knew that Tim's parents had been very religious, fanatic zealots in truth, and the poor man had suffered a lot of pain and hardships at the hands of their congregation. He and Lucas had a lot in common; if anybody inside SQ could relate and sympathize with the kid, it would be Timmy. It would also help the comms chief a lot to speak of his own family troubles with someone who obviously survived a similarly toxic situation.

 **The morning after**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Thursday 13th of February, 2020; 08:00am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, sea-deck**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

General Abelard Lincoln was taking a morning walk following an early breakfast. He'd gotten up at 06:30 as was his habit for some very light exercise, a shower and light breakfast in the public mess hall this time around to see the general crew's state of mind for his own eyes. Everything seemed to go well, not that he expected really differently. After all, most of them had been off ship when the invasion occurred and none of them could be held legally or politically responsible for the decisions and events.

Ergo, a calm, ordinary mood diffused through the crew. Even the civilian contractors and company reps were milling about in that particular zombified state common to the coffee-deprived masses across the world. Something the serving staff at the buffet counter seemed well used to by now. They passed hot drinks to their customers at breakneck speed, even before the guys had woken enough to order the solid food of their choice.

As he left the mess hall, Lincoln snorted in amusement at a disheveled corpsman coming off his night shift in med-bay who seemed to guide himself more by the smell of the coffee than by the closing eyes in his lolling head. The poor bloke wasn't alone in his situation either. As breakfast got underway and more people came in, the two-star heard grumblings from a lot of the night shift people that experienced bad feelings and weird sounds or vibrations through the bulkheads during the night.

Setting a slow pace, the senior officer walked down the staircase to deck-C to tour the ship's most emblematic and described feature: the sea-deck. He was especially interested in the moonpool. Being of the old school of navy that says you have to keep your hull intact and the water out of the boat, hearing about and seeing films about SeaQuest's famous internal waterways had struck a nerve with him. Besides the immediate concern about having so much seawater flowing inside the Aqua-Tubes all around the boat, there were also the potential breaches of security such a vast network of loosely guarded tunnels could create.

While the tubes were in fact monitored 24h / 7days like all systems, sectors and features of the ship, it was still several hundred yards of pipeworks and water moving around inside the hull. With a living breathing and apparently talking dolphin in it. Said dolphin was supposedly the reason that a certain teenager was aboard and why also a certain female doctor was chosen as chief of medicine as she has veterinary credentials.

Lincoln was more inclined to follow his hunch that somebody used an existing condition in the ship to justify putting certain people deemed ' _problematic_ ' all in the same boat ( _literally_ ) and it just happens to be the one that dives the longest and deepest in the whole fleet. By accident.

 _Snort!_ "Yeah, right! Pull the other one, it honks!" thought Abelard sarcastically. The boat might spend the most time away from the coastlines and civilized ports due to its fusion core and air treatment systems, the orders to send it to the conflict zone close to Micronesia despite its new civilian refit was not accidental by a long shot. The decision to test the hull siphons onboard of her either. The asinine decision to hold these tests near the Micronesian border, on an almost empty boat and then open her doors to complete strangers without any precedent verifications was just too many stupidities in one go to be called anything but voluntary anymore.

And Bill Noyce was still keeping mum at this time, despite all the pressure he was under since his arrest and setting aside under guard. Nobody kept quiet like that unless they had a hellavu motivation pushing at them. Motivation worse than court-martial, jail and possibly execution for treason and enslavement of a civilian child aboard a warship while taking payment for it.

The general smelled a dirty diseased rat inside the boat but wondered how to find it. Oh well, time would tell. In the meanwhile, he had a dolphin to look into and injured sailors to meet to schedule interviews around their treatment times.

 **Living sea-god**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Thursday 13th of February, 2020; 11:00am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-D, back-up command center**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Lieutenant Ortiz stretched his arms high over his head and cracked his spine one way then the other, much to the amused horror of his coworkers. He had finished his normal night shift but had been forced to take up a few more hours, almost half a shift, due to problems in the lateral sensors and WSKRS on the boat's left side. The young man was allowed the luxury of walking around a bit as his chair was now occupied by the person whose shift it really was, thus displacing the lieutenant.

Migs didn't mind as he had been suffering attention problems and antsiness in his legs and arms all night long. Ortiz could not for the life of him tell you what felt wrong about the room, but it felt wrong. No matter how he placed his chair, adjusted the resolution on the monitors or tweaked the sound in the headphones, it always came back weird to him.

It wasn't the real genuine bridge. His feelings of weirdness were psychosomatic in all likeliness. Yeah, well stop trying to psychoanalyze him and find him a damned solution! Like how about _cleaning the bloody bridge_ to make it livable again!

Oooops… Bad choice of swear… Sorry…

The invasion of the ship had gotten to his sense of home and safety real bad, and he wasn't alone in that situation. Half the crew was suffering shock-induced nightmares; the number of sleeping pills coming out of the infirmary had been qualified as an epidemic by doctor Levine.

Miguel had been lucky to be anywhere but inside SeaQuest when Shraeder came aboard. At least, that was conventional wisdom. He'd been sent off-boat, like almost everybody, to one of the carrier group's destroyers. Given the events in progress, he had been using one of SQ's portable remote monitoring stations to keep a weather eye on the ship during the tests. That was a procedure Nathan Bridger had encouraged his people to do to have as many different perspectives as possible. So while he had been physically safe, his mind had twisted like a pretzel at the sight of his best friends being hijacked, tormented and injured without any possibility to do anything to help.

Now though, the stresses of helplessly witnessing the conflict from afar, the anxiety about their injured friends and the recent political pressures from DC where some _malecons_ wanted to save admiral Noyce's hide at any costs were all piling up to become too much. Ortiz took out a handkerchief and wiped it over his face and neck, trying to calm himself and breathe at a more regular rhythm. No need to wind up in med-bay with a self-given panic attack or stress-hallucinations. Tim, Ben, Marcus and Lucas would never let him live it down!

A few days after the cursed events, even in the depths of his mind, Miguel was starting to see weird things. " _And wan' tat good wholesome fun!_ " as chief Crocker would say in his funny southern accent. The man wore his Texas culture like his girth and badge; proudly and amusingly for those who took the time to know him just a little bit. Migs was glad that he had shared a few meals aboard ship and a few drinks aground with the older mariner. He had an easy way of explaining things and setting you to calmer thoughts that no shrink Ortiz ever met could boast about.

The young crewman 2nd class at the sensor console gestured for help "Ah, boss, we got a problem on Lefty again; the satellite ain't picking but weird stuff anymore. It's like somebody's patched their TV channel into my frequencies and I'm picking up an old movie rerun, not what's out of the boat."

Frowning in disbelief, Miguel walked to the man's chair and leaned over, placing an arm over the backrest and the other hand on the console to steady his weight at rest. Boy did he need to be supported when he saw what was displayed on the monitor!

"Gimme a sec!" he told the sensor operator while gesturing at the Bush group's lieutenant-commander that had charge of the ship since their captain, Ex-O, second-mate and chief of security were all unavailable to hold the bridge during regular shifts anymore. As the LC came to stand by them, Ortiz pointed at the screen and said "I have to call Lucas Wolenczak to check out the whole comms and sensors array as well as run diagnostics on the WSKRS. There ain't no ways _THAT_ thing is real! We need to find out what's patching into our systems and purge it or we'll look like bloomin' fools again."

The senior officer looked at the bulbous, tentacular monster on the monitor as it was slowly pacing their surveillance drone on the ship's left and agreed. There was _NO WAY_ that thing could be real; they had been hacked or the repairs on the server core had been botched badly. But there was no way on God's green Earth that this sea-devil was real. Not on his watch! _Pleeeease!_ Not on his shift!

The aforementioned, now present, teenaged _multi-genius super-prodigy_ looked bored, forlorn and much put-upon all at the same time. It was quite a feat for those who knew him as they usually saw him wearing a blandly neutral, inexpressive mask. His clear change from detachment and disinterest at the situation would have been a good sign about his mental health getting better for his friends if said source of interest and emotion wasn't such a bloody nightmare on its own.

And didn't THAT say a lot about the kid's mindset! Pulled out of his shell by another beastie weirder than him. The boat's crew should have known it's what would be needed for him to become lively.

They really should have known.

"Are you telling me that what's on the monitor is real?" the lieutenant-commander asked for the third time, his voice rising into octaves not normally associated with grown men. Clearly the LC was not liking nor believing the answer he got each of the two preceding times. The other sailors around the back-up command node acquired green tints to their skins and several made religious ( _superstitious_ ) signs to ward off evil. The adolescent playfully thought that they were wasting their time on those prayers as _HE_ was already aboard and THAT wasn't changing anytime soon, even if he'd like to make it happen too.

Visually, the teenager shrugged indolently. His face had now resumed its default ' _I Sooo not give a shit_ ' expression as he stayed completely calm, detached even, from the incredulous man before him. If the officer thought his little verbal outbursts scared him, Lucas was willing to take off his T-shirt and show the presumptuous fool what it took nowadays to get any kind of fear-based reaction out of him. The man would puke his guts out then swim for the Australian shoreline while screaming his head off and Lucas would henceforth have peace anew in his miserable existence.

What Bridger, Ford and Westphalen said about it wasn't his problem anymore. The old captain was on his way out, Ford looked like he would croak if he didn't get a transfer and the woman was on the way out because the plebes in DC's backrooms were sick of hearing her point the _finger of Truth_ at the many illegalities in their schemes. Sooo, it wasn't like anybody on the tub had the rank, position or job to keep him in line anymore. He could get tetchy and mouthy without any blow-back if he felt like wasting energy and time on expressing himself. On the other hand, he'd have to _care_ enough to express anything and that wasn't happening anytime soon.

Or he could just fall back on an old piece of conventional wisdom he learned as a kid; " _You answer to idiots by silence; you don't confirm their uselessness by paying them the respect of a verbal return._ " Lucas wondered idly what the senior officer from the Bush would say to that line of thought about his exalted military self. Nothing polite or intelligible, probably; he was a soldier after all.

Sighing in deep, long-suffering patience, the young technical prodigy explained again the basics of the situation: "It's not the systems. I checked. I have been checking every morning and evening since the invasion to make certain we didn't unknowingly carry a virus or Trojan or spyware or whatever that Shraeder's cheap _skript-kiddie_ could have let loose in my wires. The WSKRS is showing truthfully what is out there. The actual 'WHAT' part is for the biologists to explain, not me. Unless it comes with a tracking collar or implanted GPS beacon, I don't do bios, especially xenos. Call the other department for service."

"Fine then!" spat the Bush's LC. "Call me Bridger, Westphalen and get general Lincoln too! We'll see how far that little virtual joke of yours goes when the heavies are breathing down your neck, backstabbing little bastard!" The officer shouted out at Lucas, obviously hoping ( _praying real hard_ ) that it was a bad case of juvenile prank at the wrong moment.

The alternative did not bear thinking about.

About ten minutes later, the desired senior officers and scientist were assembled in the secondary bridge room, looking at the image on the main monitor that was hung high on the wall at the front of the room, just above the helm and navigation stations.

It made for frighteningly fascinating viewing.

Nathan Bridger passed a hand on the short beard stubble at his chin, idly scratching at the right side of his jaw. Like any navy man, he'd seen his fare share of weirdness in his years and had developed a more spiritual, less materialistic outlook on life than he had when coming out of the Academy with his freshly minted PhD in naval architecture and DSV engineering. The Great Mother Sea had a way of doing that to those who devoted their career and life to sailing her waves or beneath them.

Nathan had never considered himself superstitious but did believe in two divinities. He had been raised in the Protestant conservative version of the faith of Jesus the Christ who redeems the sins of those who try to better themselves by helping the community. The other he came by as a matter of course; no professional sailor or person who lived and raised a family by the water's edge could resist developping a close bond with Mother Sea and her children.

It wasn't like he prayed all that much and honestly hadn't been inside a church since the day of Robert's memorial service seven years ago. When Carol had died, he had let the US Coast Guard bring her to the mainland for autopsy then he had brought her back to the island to bury her in the sediments at low tide. She was near him but with their son as well since his body had never been recovered from the wreckage of the missile cruiser when it sank with all hands aboard near Micronesia.

That day was when Nathan stopped believing in Christian church dogma and fell back on the antique, more primitive but much more realistic faith of the Sea. It had been what allowed him to climb out of the bottle after Carol's passing and what kept him sober now. It is what allowed him the clarity of mind to scuttle his new career to save his life rather than let William Noyce bring him down to the pits with him as everything went belly-up.

It was also that primitive belief steeped in antiquity and legends that allowed the veteran sailor to behold the new biological on screen and say out loud with perfect calm: "Well, hello there. Where have you been hiding all this time?"

The officers from the Bush glared at Bridger's back in disbelief while the LC palmed his face, wondering just how many nut cases this ship carried. Doctor Westphalen was busy with a data-pad, trying to find the listings of jellyfish and cephalopods to prepare a comparative while the general just leaned on the back of the command chair, shaking his head in utter defeat.

Lucas Wolenczak, smarmy little git that he was, proclaimed loudly for all to hear "Told you my wires were clean."

"Get the fuck of my bridge!" the lieutenant-commander shouted as his stress levels reached critical.

"Make me." Replied the teenager in an obviously contrarian mood all of a sudden.

The poor LC turned towards the superiors on deck and was met by three flat uncaring stares.

"I'm gone at the end of the month." Bridger spoke plainly before turning back towards the sensor readouts. They truly were fascinating.

"I never had any authority over him to begin with." The female medic explained in her prim and proper British accent. She actually winked at the boy before turning back to her zoological taxonomies and the paper pad she pulled out to take notes with a pencil.

General Lincoln pursed his lips to hide his amusement at the poor LC's dire straights and spoke in his clear grave voice. "Well, if you don't need him anymore, perhaps I could do his interview right this morning since the people scheduled have found occupations that count as prioritary over the audit."

Lucas suddenly looked far less sure of himself as he asked in low, fearful voice "I have to go and do admin? And paperwork? Surely you're not that cruel against a poor defenseless child as to send me away to do _that_ , are you sir? Please… I'll be good, I promise!" He spoke earnestly with great big wet eyes and pouted lower lip. He even folded his hands in front of him in supplication, hoping to convince the sailor to let him dodge the dreaded paperwork monster.

Surrounded by a dozen stunned glares of surprise, Lucas snorted in disbelief at just how gullible people could be in their old age. Resetting to his default attitude, he shoved his hands deeply in his jeans' pockets as he walked towards the door and called out gamely "Okay general; let me show you what I learned about dancing with a two-star during my time around DC. We be havin' good times today, that we do indeed!" he told the older man in a fake-southern accent that was a passable imitation of Crocker's own drawl.

Abelard burst out laughing as he made for the door in his turn, leaving a crowd of stunned, fearful and, in Nathan's case, slightly amused adults in his wake. The auditor had a feeling that interviewing Lucas would be a wild ride to remember. It would also be the kind of meeting that reminded him of why he chose to join the GAO branch of service instead of going to the other more ' _glorious_ ' branches.

Justice was never glorious, but she was a lot more fundamental and vital to the good running of society and the military than glory ever was. Getting answers out of Wolenczak about his situation aboard and the actual daily activities of the crew would be worthwhile and a good start to his audit.

 **I have many, many, many arms to give you the finger with**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Thursday 13th of February, 2020; 15:00pm**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, ward room**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Captain Bridger sat at the head of the table, the large view-screen behind him showing a blow-up visual of their new aquatic friend as it seemed to swim along in the path of the WSKRS called 'Lefty'. The people assembled in the ward room had received the information gathered to date and spent the last hour trying to find more or come up with _solutions_ to the large creature's presence.

Gazing around the table, Bridger was saddened to see the sorry state of his alpha-shift crew in the wake of the boat being invaded. He might be leaving at the end of the month with the auditor but that didn't mean he had no pride in his ship or that he desired ill-luck and violence on her remaining crew.

Commander Jonathan Ford was nursing a broken jaw, lesions that required stitching and several contusions that were now discolored like the tail-end of an LSD bad trip.

Lt-com Katherine Hitchcock had been bruised and badly shaken, but escaped the worse physical injuries that she should have gotten in her situation. She and Ford would however experience nightmares for weeks, maybe months.

Chief of security Crocker had come out uninjured but had developed a palsy in his left hand that seemed to manifest only when he was at rest or truly quiescent. The medics didn't even know how or why that happened as he had come out of the invasion practically healthier than before due to all the exercise he had done to stay away from the mercs and their search parties.

Every other officer and civilian that sat on the ship's council had been off-ship, spread around the Bush group's boats until the tests were done so they were all healthy as could be. Unfortunately, it also meant that they had problems relating to the survivors who were shipboard when it happened. Relations would be tense for a while, and would not normalize before Nathan left the ship. He hated feeling as if he were quitting the job when it wasn't finished. It made him feel as if he were dumping the mess on somebody else.

Fixing his sight on the two civilian contractors that could have any use in the situation, he saw they were looking at the screen with glazed eyes, still wallowing in the disbelief phase of the meeting. Snorting silently in contempt, the old captain refrained from shaking his head or giving a visible sign of displeasure. It was his problem for now, but it wouldn't be his boat soon enough that he didn't feel he had the right to change the council to have more mentally adaptative people on it. The next commander could fix that himself.

Turning towards the end of the table, there was Lucas, trying to be unseen behind Kristen's vast fluffy mound of red hair. The boy had never been asked to come to a council meeting before. He had given them raw data, a few pre-formated reports and only once had he been put on the viewer so he could answer questions about software glitches that he fixed instead of waiting another week for written answers to simple questions. Now he was physically present in the room and looked lost in his chair, as if he didn't know why he was here or what use he could have. He sat quietly and listened to everything but without making a peep. He didn't distract them but clearly felt he would if he spoke out.

The only person who thought he could be useful besides Nathan was doctor Westphalen. She had called the young man to sit besides her and had spread her data-pads and paper notes between their places to show him her efforts and ask for his opinions. What she thought the ship's expert cyberneticist could know about xeno- or crypto-biology was yet a mystery.

The last person at the table was general Lincoln. The GAO auditor was sitting placidly in his chair with a plate of cherry scones and mug of coffee, indicating the man thought his afternoon tea-break was still important despite the giant living sea creature that seemed quite enamored of their little satellite. Honestly though, Bridger understood the man's attitude better than he wanted to admit, even in his own mind.

General Lincoln had come aboard to run an audit about the invasion, the crew's response and evaluate the type of idiocy that led to using a fully enabled nuclear sub to be chosen for the damned tests in the first place. It wasn't anywhere in the man's mandate to deal with scientific discovery or first contact scenarios when encountering new lifeforms. Nathan could see why the man was quietly staying in the backseat for this mess. He would too, if he had the option.

Kathy spoke to Miguel and Timothy loud enough to attract the attention of everybody. "What about the lights? Maybe that thing is simply attracted to the lights on the WSKRS because there isn't much of that in the depths of the trench?" she asked her colleagues.

Kristen put paid to that right away. "No dear, it wouldn't react to lights. The scans we have, coupled with its overall physicality suggest it's closer to jellyfish than octopi and all jellies are completely devoid of optical organs. It is blinder than anything else out there. If it's attracted to an object, it would be because of sounds or vibrations from the machine's internal parts that translate through water as sounds."

The engineer nodded her thanks at the doctor, she had cleared up a lot of things simply and efficiently, something Kathy needed these days. Looking around at the people around the table who understood these things better than her, the commander asked the fatidic question. "Well, what do we do with it? We can't just let a giant jellyfish tag along on our tour. If we get out of its natural habitat it could become sick or aggressive. Right now it looks tame enough, but I'm not sure that would last."

"No it wouldn't last." came her confirmation from the very last person to be expected. Lucas shifted in his chair aware that he'd spoken out of turn and now had the attention of everybody in the room pinned on him. Blinking at the expectant faces that were waiting for him to inform them, the kid took his ubiquitous thermal mug in both hands, pressing it to his chest like a protective shield before he continued his thoughts. "It's a predator. As doctor W can confirm, there are no such things as vegetarian jellyfish. They all actively swim around sensing water currents, vibrations and temperature for the presence of warm-blooded creatures to grasp, poison to sleep with their tentacles and then slowly digest over several days."

Gesturing vaguely at the still image on the viewer, the adolescent concluded "That thing's curiosity with the WSKRS won't last either. It's not returning whatever communication the big one is doing, it's not a possible reproduction partner and it's way smaller than the other guy. I'm guessing the big one will either get upset at being ignored or hungry enough to try a nibble soon. Then it'll go after the Quest's main hull or an MR shuttle if we put one out when the beastie's there."

Kristen nodded while also using her left hand to pull some of her luxuriant red hair back behind an ear to have some side vision once more. She enjoyed letting her hair loose and it certainly attracted the attention of men who met her but in meetings like this it could get a bit much to manage. If only she hadn't forgotten her hair clips in her office when the emergency call to the secondary bridge had come.

Taking a breath, the senior female veterinarian expounded on her young colleague's ( _when had_ **that** _happened?_ ) already good explanation. "Lucas is of course correct. Absolutely all jellies are exclusively carnivorous and predatory. Only the presence of something in a similar genus will make them pause long enough to evaluate the other's potential as a mate before it then tries to eat it if reproduction is deemed not feasible. As I sincerely doubt that the drone will consent to spawn larvae, I do believe the giant proto-leviathan will decide on attempting… a nibble, yes… quite soon."

Bridger gave the woman a long-suffering gaze and asked out loud "Is there any person with an idea of how to deal with this creature without using the boat's main plasma lasers on it? It could very well be unique, and at its size is most likely several centuries old. Perhaps even millenia. In the name of understanding the ocean better, especially the deep secretive places like the Tonga Trench where we are cruising right now; we can't simply zap and pickle in brandy anything we've never seen before. So, suggestions anyone?"

Timothy O'Neil raised a finger to get the old mariner's attention and then spoke: "We know from the experts" he gestured towards Kristen and Lucas "That this thing looks for sounds, vibrations and temperature changes while it hunts. Let's vary those things around the WSKRS until we get a reaction we want and then apply it to the entire cadre of dependent craft we have. I don't know if tweaking the whole ship will be feasible, but we could at least give it a try."

Kathy added "For the ship it will be easy. As soon as the hard data about what makes this beastie react comes in, I will be able to pull a few people to work on creating emitters to place around the ship's outer hull and dive planes so we can generate the signals at will. From then on, the creature should no longer see us as either food or friend, just some other big thing it should ignore."

Looking around for other opinions, he saw the consensus had been established and agreed witht them.

"I accept your plan with an addition." The captain decided out loud. Turning to the teenager at the end of the table he spoke a specific set of orders: "Lucas, I want you to back-track all the video footage from the WSKRS and shipboard sensors until you spot the moment of first contact with the jellyfish. When you note that down, you need to backtrack further by 15 minute increments to see if there are any determining events in the ship's energy, sonic or vibrational emissions. A creature this size would normally be at home deep into the 'midnight' zone of the Tonga Trench or Marianas Trench, not near the lip of the canyon like we are cruising right now. Something called to it, gave it incentive to rise up from the depths and attach to our convoy. We need to find that 'bait' so we can stop emitting it thus stopping the reason the creature follows us."

General Lincoln took a slow sip of coffee before asking "You believe this creature was ' _baited_ ' or ' _teased_ ' out of its domain of predilection… As if we put chum in the water to bring in the sharks before dropping the lines in… Is that about right?" He asked for confirmation looking around the table.

Seeing several nods from the people around, the general then made the killer comment none of them thought about: "What about blood trails then? You just had several fresh bloody kills aboard. Some of them were done near the Aqua-Tubes and maybe, possibly, some of the blood seeped into the waterways and floated around until it let out to sea when you opened the hatches to allow the dolphin to move in and out for his feeding cycle. Could THAT have attracted the beastie?"

Bridger frowned in deep thought as did Hitchcock and Crocker, all of them trying to remember the schedules for the HAZMAT and regular cleaning crews. Manilow passed a hand over his chin and exhaled tiredly. "The bridge got wrecked so bad that the moonpool's wellhead was shattered and the sea water splashed and sloshed all around for hours before we isolated that segment of pipe and closed the water gates inside the sector's tubes. That water and its contents stagnated in the segment for almost three days before we opened up to purge it to do the maintenance. It's mighty possible that some of the organic debris was expelled out to sea when we let Darwin out this morning."

The adolescent made a face and acknowledged tartly that their might be a correlation between the results of his ' _defensive efforts_ ' on the ship's behalf and the appearance of a nosy neighbor. He did point out however that no other predator species known to inhabit this depth and react to blood-spoor had begun following the ship so he had ' _reasonable_ ' doubts about the theory.

Bridger shrugged and responded to the boy's protest "Maybe, Kiddo. But it's the best idea we've had all meeting. So, get to it and find the timeline. The biologists can deal with the animal psychology and training routines later on."

Everyone at the table had to clamp their mouths shut to hold in their laughter at the adolescent's offended face. " _Kiddo?_ " he mouthed silently, obviously annoyed at being afflicted with such a childish term of endearment. "Why not _killer_ or _ripper_ or _champion_? Or anything that sounds adult and, I don't know, _manly_?" Lucas protested venomously. The sight of the boy crossing his arms over his chest in a good and proper teenaged sulk was too much for the adults; they all burst out laughing at him.

"Go ahead and laugh, you bastards! See if I save your ship the next time around!" he pouted, firmly convinced he was the aggrieved party in this dispute.

 **Howdy, neighbor! Can I borrow some sugar?**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Thursday 13th of February, 2020; 18:00pm**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, ward room**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

It had been three hours since the first meeting about the eerie new biological that was still placidly tailing their sensor drone like a mule after a carrot. If only the situation was so simple.

The persons concerned were assembled in the ward room again, with fewer presences as they had not contributed anything the first time around. Captain Bridger had decided to not uselessly take the time of some civilians despite their having a seat on the ship's management council. This was a specific case of first contact with new life; those people were not at all in their element and would only take space and time for nothing. General Lincoln had chosen to process interviews for his audit, a welcome relief for the scientists gathered to solve the problem.

With less people present, captain Bridger had them cluster closely towards his end of the table, leaving the last six seats open. Lucas was again seated by Kristen's side and still pouting about something, although it seemed for a different reason this time.

"I could work well enough alone in my cabin, doc. I don't need to be watched over like a child! Besides, if I wanted to ' _get into mischief_ ' as you so quaintly said, would you really be able to stop me from doing it?" The teenager groused, his apparent upset more to defend his independence than any real anger against the woman's unforeseen bout of mothering.

Doctor Westphalen replied with a tone that matched her knowing smirk as she was placing her paper notepads and tablet computers on the table in order. "I have no doubts as to your autonomy or independence, Lucas; quite the contrary. It's in fact that you are too independent, passed the point of detachment and well into isolation. THAT is something that I intend to remedy. You are a civilian and a scientist, or technologist at any rate, and are therefore under MY department's supervision. So, I intend to supervise you as I should have from the start." She finished her answer and preparations at the same time with much amusement at the boy's sudden anxiety.

"Whoooaaa, there! Nobody said no nuttin' about supervisin' my work time like that!" Lucas stiffened defensively as his entire demeanor became clearly rigid and aggressive at the same time. "Besides, I think you have a problem in keeping your job definitions straight: you're the Chief Medical Officer on board, not the chief of cybernetics, sensors or comms! THOSE are MY domains, not yours! Get outta my sandboxes, woman!" The adolescent declared with a tone of voice and body language that were now markedly openly aggressive towards the female doctor.

Kristen had been saying these things as a tease to get a reaction out of the young man. After the mid-afternoon meeting she had grabbed his arm ( _very gently_ ) and dragged ( _cajoled_ ) him to the sea-deck to sit him in her office so they could share professional thoughts ( _her tin of scottish shortbread cookies_ ) while they worked on their assigned projects ( _and small talk at the same time_ ). Their time together had been pleasant for both from what she saw, and she thought honestly that a bit more human contact would help the boy with the many ailments in his heart.

Except she forgot the two cardinal facts about helping people with emotional and mental issues: **1)** they have a mind of their own; **2)** they often feel as they can do better on their lonesome as all outside interference's usually aggravate the already dangerous situation.

Sighing in despondent melancholy, Kristen stunned the bejeezus out of the young male when she forgot herself, and her professional restraint, by leaning sideways to wrap a half-hug around his shoulders with her right arm. It was a harmless subconscious gesture on her part, an attempt to make things better and show him she was not mad at him despite his rather rude attitude just now. She realized she had overstepped the **invisible line** when he froze solid besides her, hands clenched on the armrests of his chair tightly enough to make the simile-leather crackle under the pressure.

Turning his head very slowly towards the woman medic, Lucas glared at her hard enough to emulate the SeaQuest's search beams, making Kristen uneasy about further potential reactions from him. "Please doctor; **DO NOT** touch me without warning me in advance. The consequences for people who do are not usually pleasant." The teen **commanded** stiffly as his body vibrated from pent-up anxiety, surprise and rage at having his defensive perimeter breached so carelessly.

Kristen was about to try and say something, anything, to soothe the child back from an obvious stress attack when Lucas laboriously unclasped his hands from the armrests of the chair so he could make a show of placing the small four inch long knives back into the spring-loaded wrist sheaths hid by the long sleeves of his flannel shirt. Everyone at the table saw how Lucas then looked from where Westphalen's arm rested around his neck on his left side and slowly, meticulously moved his eyes from her elbow all the way up to her shoulder and then her face. The closed-off, coldly refractive stance on his face told her clearly to pull away from him or painfully lose the arm in small, consecutive pieces.

Kristen swallowed past the lump of fear in her throat as she withdrew her arm back inside her own personal space, her movements being tracked all the while by the defensive teenager. It took a good five minutes of silent staring contest before Lucas started to relax from his active defensive stance and began to sit backwards in a semi-slouch as he tried again to shyly disappear into the cushions of the chair so nobody noticed his presence in the meeting room.

Bridger made a mental note to himself to ask both persons what that had been about later in the evening. Until then, he had a discovery reunion to lead.

The ward room was emptying after a short hour of somewhat fruitless meeting. Lucas had once again performed above and beyond expectations ( _which were rather low at this point_ ) and delivered both the time of the creature's appearance and the confirmation that blood and solid organic debris had vented from the ship into the ocean about an hour before first contact. Apparently, somebody decided that all the food from the damaged pantry freezer in the galley was gonna waste anyways, so why not give it to the fish out there? Those same people, from the Bush cleanup crew, then proceeded to dump the waste edibles into the aqua-tube after removing all packing and transport materials so only the organics were flushed as if it were going out of a regular toilet. They had planned right, though; when opened to the outside ocean, the suction caused by the exhaust of liquid and pressurized air had indeed pulled everything out and away from the ship. Lucas conjectured that it was the heavy solids from their humanoid food that had marinated in the blood and offal for about two days already that brought the blood-spoor down to the level of the proto-leviathan to be perceived. Kristen confirmed for him that otherwise the blood by itself would not have managed to reach those depths without dissolving fully.

Other than that, the people at sensors and comms had not lucked out on finding which sounds, vibrations or thermal variances could possibly make the giant jellyfish react. The solution might really be a chemical reaction based on blood or decomposed flesh in the sea water and that would be a pain to process and manipulate to communicate with the massive many-armed being. At least it wasn't aggressive yet but as warned by Westphalen and the biology experts, that was a question of time. Namely the entity's stomach needing filled. Jellies were exclusively predatory and the only big morsel around was the SeaQuest herself, unless they tried to sacrifice an MR shuttle to bait it away from them.

While the solution had its merits, they were limited and the monetary cost might make the people in Washington DC grit their teeth in pain at the thought of the bill.

Speaking of bills, a message had come in about Noyce being transferred to Fort Leavenworth during their meeting. It was a good news overall, just not that good. It had to happen some time or another.

Sighing in tiredness about the weird day that doesn't end, Bridger passed a weary palm over his eyes and gestured to the last civilians to stay in the room after closing the door.

Kristen looked at him interrogatively whilst Lucas just closed one door and then crossed the room to close the other before going back to sit in his chair silently. The boy's silent obedience to small things and instinctive foresight of coming important events made him an asset in most situations. It was the small ' _friction points_ ' that detracted from just how valuable he could really become if he was a little less reclusive and standoffish.

If only Nathan didn't have some rather clear view of why the kid was that way.

"Both of you; pack up your things and come sit besides me. Together on the same side, I want to look at both at the same time when I speak. Thank you." The senior officer spoke clearly but without anger. He had a guess as to what happened but wanted to clear it up before bad feelings settled in and poisoned the air between the teenager and doctor. They seemed to be capable of working well together and Lucas had not seemed incommoded by his afternoon in her office so he wanted to try and make some sort of workable agreement that both could hold without added stress in their work.

After the two scientists were newly seated, Bridger leaned backwards into the backrest of his chair and took off his glasses, folding them and tucking them into his shirt pocket safely. He took a minute to contemplate the two, reading their body language and the different silent cues they were sending out, especially towards each other. His old CIA training was paying dividends again and he was happy for having taken the time to go through it at the time. It just never stopped being useful.

Lucas was sitting leaned backwards like Bridger but centered in his chair, hands folded in his lap, fingers laced together. His face reflected almost nothing; the level of blandness the kid could project when he desired to hide his feelings was impressive for someone his age. In a very bad way. Nathan's wife Carol had been a primary grade teacher in Florida. She had been trained to spot many types of abuses among the children in her care. She had taught this to Nathan immediately after they had been engaged and then taught it to Robert when he turned 6 years old and entered the school where she was located.

Lucas rang the warning bells on about a dozen types of violence and victimization that Nathan knew about and it made him sick to think of the usually gentle, amicable teenager getting hurt like that. It also explained his choice of measures when fighting against Shraeder and his men. Remote controlled proxies with insured lethality; no prisoners and no mercy offered or bartered for surrender thus nobody survives to come after him later on.

Kristen seemed a bit anxious but not for herself. She sat primly as her old fashioned British upper class London education demanded. But, to the trained eye, she favored her right side, slightly leaning towards Lucas in an unconscious effort to protect him and place herself in the way should Nathan try to grab or hit the boy. So whatever happened, she was past it already and wanted to keep it private, or at least not in the ship's records for fear it would be used against Lucas in his already vulnerable situation.

Pursing his lips and affecting a neutral stance of his own, Bridger folded his hands on the tabletop and asked in low tone "What happened between you two at the beginning of the meeting?" Then he waited to see who would answer and what line he'd be fed.

Surprisingly, it was Lucas who shrugged and flipped outwards his right hand, triggering the holdout sling to deliver the 4 inch knife to his palm. He held the blade to the light to show it but kept it well in hand, making no gestures towards either adult. After a few seconds, he again reloaded the holdout and pulled his shirt sleeve over it, hiding his defense from sight.

Kristen coughed a bit and explained in short words, displaying a less tolerant temper than usual: "I scared him with a gesture he didn't see coming and he reacted by drawing his blades in each hand. Note that he didn't actually point them at anybody nor made any threats. I saw them when he returned them to storage as he just did with this one. I am not angry or anxious in his presence, simply disappointed that I startled him. I had intended the gesture as friendly, even as supportive, but it was not passed along… correctly… I assure you that we will discuss this in private and not have such miscommunication again."

The female doctor's facial expression was partially detached but still showed some sadness and emotional turmoil. Probably because she was the touchy-feely kind of healer and being told by any patient, especially a young teen, to keep her distances and her hands off him had not passed well. She would clearly get over the event, but she would also very obviously try to be more present by his side and have a more constant implication in his life. The captain was able to see through the boy's assumed indolent façade that he was actually quite put out as he saw this as an infringement on his autonomy ( _well, duh!_ ) and more obviously, he had no bloody idea what to do about any sort of adult attention that wasn't hurtful or dangerous.

The kid was probably praying for another invasion; **that** he was emotionally geared to understand and deal with in a socially acceptable ( _almost_ ) manner. Motherliness he most assuredly had no idea of how to cope with. Or the mother herself, if Bridger's gut feeling was right.

After about a minute of contemplating the two persons, the sailor made a vague gesture of the hand and spelled out the reality for them. "I leave the ship as soon as the inquiry is finished or when the repairs and crew changes have been finalized, whichever is the latest. Keep it clean and above the beltline and I won't intervene. Force me to get involved and I will publicly hold you both by the hand like rambunctious toddlers throwing a tantrum until you can manage without daily supervision. Is it clear?"

The two offended faces in front of him nodded tartly at his attempted humor at their expense then they took up their gear and left in a joint huff.

"Well, there's teamwork for you." Thought the captain playfully as he watched them go.

 **Pushing paper until it pushes back**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Thursday 13th of February, 2020; 18:45pm**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, VIP stateroom**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

General Lincoln was in his VIP cabin on deck-A, sitting on a chair besides the table holding all the hard-copy files, nursing a cup of strong honey-sweetened tea. He was preparing mentally for a long evening of processing papers and typing out emails carrying forth requests for information and access to classified files which would probably bounce back with inane answers about his security clearance not being high enough or up to date enough to have the right to even know the files and events existed in the first place.

Just another boring slow night on the job, as usual for the first week of an audit.

Setting down on the table the automated transcription of his first very summary interview with Lucas Wolenczak earlier during the day, the older black male grunted in amusement in memory of how that hour had gone down. The adolescent had a biting sense of humour and finely developed talents at sarcasm backed by an all-encompassing skepticism about everything around him that few people could boast about nowadays. Not unless they were hardened veterans that survived a war or three from the perspective of the front lines. Eking out subsistence in the trenches, wading in the filth left by conflict and humanity, that had a way of maturing and seasoning a person until thy saw the world's raw, uncoloured reality rather than the false images pushed on the general populace. It was a sad testament to their species that there existed children like Lucas who lived such lives without anybody trying to help them recover.

Emitting a low soft sigh, Abelard turned over the top of the manila folder to look at the official picture of the boy taken at his arrival to the ship around five months ago. He looked clearly unhealthy, thin to the point of meatless and his skin around the face was so damn pale it was almost transparent. He looked like an emaciated survivor from a concentration camp out of Nazi Germany or the lost forests of the Vietnam conflict. It wasn't any wonder that several of the crew had responded by closing ranks around the kid to instinctively create a protective ring of support and care. It was mostly women but two handfuls of men had been included, each with clearly obvious reasons in their past why they were reliable as caregivers for a damaged, hurting child. There were a lot of young men who joined the Navy just barely out of school to ditch abusive, violent household conditions while others wanted out of the orphanages and back-alleys where they lived ASAP. The Navy took them all in and gave them home, family and purpose for which they were happy and grateful. Now they saw an opportunity to extend that feeling of safety, homeliness and care to the wounded young soul that was dumped in their boat like so much garbage by his slovenly parents.

The 2-stars had no problems understanding the dynamics of how the teen's first weeks aboard had been with a slow progression of improvement as his capacities and performances became known to the crew and officers. The fact that everybody aboard had basically shunned Will Noyce's **written orders to "break and enslave the boy to their will"** had helped a lot in creating a basic level of trust for the kid to stand on and develop some tentative links with the adults around. Even the most ageistic bigots who were refractory to his presence had gone from outwardly insulting to just silently ignoring his existence as time went along. A good beginning, but not really enough given the circumstances.

With another sigh, Abelard turned the pages of the official ' _service jacket_ ' if one could call that file such in the case of an unlawfully press-ganged boy and flipped paper until he reached the first page of the interview. The meeting had lasted only about an hour before a call had come from doctor Westphalen that she needed the kid to speak with the dolphin when he came back from feeding. The short sit-down had happened in his office on deck-C in rather sterile context as the general never bothered to customize or decorate such little rooms during his work. He never stayed long and it was never good to give the crewmen the impression that you were settling in for a long term inside their territory. It gave bad ideas that the case was worse and more complex than usually was the situation and could therefore affect what people said and how they presented it. Subconscious reflexes and self-protection mechanisms were a bitch to deal with, especially in close quarters inside a motorized pressure cooker like a military ship at sea.

Passing a weary hand over his forehead, the veteran officer focused on the few pages of transcript as they really hadn't had much time to speak of very consequential things as of yet. The kid confirmed his placement orders, how they happened and who inside the US Navy and UEO Fleet had authorized the whole shebang. He even had a written version of this entire story typed out on a file which he transferred to the general's working laptop to include in the audit processes in the hopes that somebody would see it and get him off the boat. He also had written versions of the official court filings and processes about the multiple lawsuits against his father, WPP and associated contractors around the world for non-payment of materials and services, making him work in WPP without his Union memberships or competency licenses up to date, refusal of assistance with many dangerous parts of his jobs and forcing him to access restricted areas of the project without protective gear, support personnel or even the security clearance to be legally there.

Yeah… Somebody really screwed the pooch over there. And, with all those lawsuits beginning their phase of evidenciary discovery in the coming two weeks, in four different countries with another three more the month after, Wolenczak and Noyce thought it would be intelligent to abscond the kid to a submarine out of his home country. Couldn't the idiots see with their bare eyes just how transparent a move to silence a witness this was? Of course, with mister " _Let's make a deal_ " in the White House, there was an actual chance that they could offer enough money and favours to kill the criminal investigations in the USA at the least and push the rest under the UEO's proverbial rug.

Pushing away Lucas's file, the general took up the small stack of other preliminary interviews he had managed to conduct today already. They were with the people who had put forms in his office mailbox before he got aboard. Half had simply been short half-hour meetings to clear out any doubts before he told them that their complaints were irreceivable or flat out illegitimate and bordered on false accusations bad enough to warrant charges for it. The other half were valid and he had done the basic meet-&-greet with each person, specifically to see if there had been multiple people present during the events they complained about and ask if these extra witnesses would collaborate willingly or have to be compelled by a court warrant.

For a first day of auditing, it had been annoyingly active and the surprise with the giant bulbous floater off their side had not helped at all. The entire crew was antsy and several he had pegged as ' _collaborative_ ' had been rendered temporarily refractive to his presence. That would of course change in a few days but it made the beginning processes more onerous than they should be. The fact Bridger was clearly no longer mentally or emotionally attached to the boat and crew was now so blatant in each meeting or interaction he had with the man that Abelard wondered how soon the whole thing would unravel due to sheer lack of command presence above the lieutenant ranks. His senior underlings were burned out, damaged and not completely certain they wanted to stay in the Navy, so yeah… L-C and above, from Hitchcock and up were pretty much no longer serviceable and couldn't be counted on.

"Damn, this boat was floating itself down the crapper at flanking speeds..." he mumbled.

The veteran officer took his pen from the table besides the saucer and signed off on closing two more complaints as being frivolous before dumping the folders into the ' _waste_ ' pile of finished work. Turning towards his laptop that was set up on the table, sleeping away until prompted, he moved the mouse a bit to wake up the CPU and then opened his master spreadsheet in which he listed each complaint, what it was about, from who, what work was done about it and what the final disposition of the case had been. He typed in the decisions he had already committed today about the eleven cases, adjusted a few details about the psych profiles of individuals on the other tab then saved everything.

Getting up from the chair and stretching his arms and back, the older man grunted to himself that spending an hour or more sitting inertly on a chair really wasn't good for his health anymore at his age. Checking the time on the portable's clock which read 18:57pm, he decided to collect and re-pile his folders before going out for a quick evening meal in the main mess hall. The place had been the first cleaned up by HAZMAT when they got aboard so the crew could resume as much of their normality as possible. Given that between fifty and seventy extra people from the Bush Group were aboard daily for the foreseeable future and they needed food and services just like the residents, he could understand the logic. Abelard wondered however how the locals had taken emotionally that all those damages and bloodshed had been literally _swept away_ in less than four hours of work by HAZMAT.

Shaking his head to clear it a bit, the auditor took up his keys, cards and cap, closed his door and walked out to the mess hall for sustenance. He wasn't a psychiatrist; the crew's emotional well-being would have to be tended by the pros when they got here.

 **Notice: do not feed the wildlife**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Thursday 13th of February, 2020; 21:24pm**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-D, back-up command center**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

The people on the secondary bridge were getting more relaxed as time went by. Their ginormous tag-along hadn't done much more than wave its many arms at them indolently as it swam along at a speeds that few aquatic organics could boast about reaching without getting shot from a mechanical launcher in order to fertilize the seascape. The lieutenant-commander in charge was on loan from the Bush Carrier Group's escort destroyer Momsen, an Arleigh-Burke II-A variant that was dedicated to mine sweeping and anti-sub warfare. Quite an appropriate choice of officer given the context.

The officer had been apprised of the situation before his shift and received probant confirmations from both captain Bridger and general Lincoln that the crew would ALL serve and help as they could should any emergency arrive. The man had his doubts about several, mostly due to injuries and psych blow-back from the invasion they suffered but he kept his opinions to himself in silence.

As he sat in the center seat watching over the calm operations of the boat, much more peaceful than the bridge deck on a destroyer since silence was usually at a premium on submarines, he couldn't help but think he missed the noises of his own ship. Especially since he couldn't help but shiver at the thought everybody was keeping silent out of fear of waking up the predatory instincts of their neighbor.

Looking at the side monitor with an unhealthy mixture of awe and dread, the LC was again reminded that people with education and strong heads were necessary in the military services or they would all get themselves blown up to bits. If this beastie was what the earth kept in reserve just for fun, what would they find when they reached out to the stars in super-light ships to explore other planets?

As the veteran mused silently about the deeper mysteries of the ocean ( _ironic, that…_ ) the doors of the room opened to let in Nathan Bridger, doctor Westphalen and the chief engineer who looked like she hadn't slept well in several days. The three persons came right at the LC and explained the situation; the biochemists in the sea-deck had come up with a fake blood-spoor that they placed into immersible smoke-signal emitters. These things were the underwater equivalent to roadside emergency flares used to signal an accident and ask for help. The fluorescent colored smoke was normally clearly visible and had a seriously hot temperature to mark it clearly on the thermographs that were basic sensor equipment on all subs since 2010. The goal was to dump out of the torpedo tubes several of these spoor smokers and then watch the creature's reaction.

Not having anything to lose since it was still legally Bridger's command anyways, the LC gave the orders to check the ordinance load-out and prepare to fire. After two short minutes, the lights turned green on the weapons board so he gave the go ahead to launch the four canisters, two per tube which was weird but not his choice to make or question when the eggheads were at hand to decide that sorta scientsy stuff. Unfortunately for the entire battle group and SeaQuest in particular, the L-C made a crucial error of judgment: he didn't verify the blueprints and functions of the ordinance he ordered used ( _as he should have_ ) since he thought ( _but didn't verify_ ) that Bridger had done so as captain of the boat or delegated the job to Hitchcock as chief engineer or even Crocker as the chief of security.

 **Bridger had done neither of those.**

The basic problem was that everybody ranked lieutenant and above on the ship was burned-out, sleep deprived and had trouble focusing on the smaller, less common details of the jobs they were doing, and doing them in an honestly sloppy way at this point of time. Bridger didn't verify the way the smoke diffusers were assembled because the normal method of usage was to load them into a torpedo in replacement of the explosive warhead so the marking gas would deploy from the desired emplacement at the appointed time. That would be the case IF the smokers had been set by the ship's artillery specialists as per regulations. Instead, they were filled, primed and brought by the science lab people directly to the ship's only existing torpedo bay, in the chin under the bridge saucer section. They told the two sailors on duty, a pair of **generic 1** **st** **class crewmen** loaned by another of the Bush escorts, to " _Have those things ready to launch on the captain's command or else he'll come tell you himself_ ".

Without further explanation of either the devices or the effects desired.

Well, since the ship was in this mess because of people **NOT FOLLOWING ORDERS** ; the two sailors knew damn well that any disobedience, recalcitrance or inventiveness when applying orders received from direct superiors would not in any ways be allowed to pass unpunished. Like good little soldiers, they **turned off their minds** and just obeyed blindly the orders received. Without checking with the conn officer on the bridge or the captain if these tech-heads had any right to give these orders at all. The amateurish Jerry-rigged devices were misloaded two per tube despite there being six functional tubes to spread them around as was the usual protocol to avoid the shot bunching at the muzzle or over pressuring the tube when it triggered.

From the grunts below decks to the sea-deck squints to the senior officers to the watch commander on duty, not a single one of the officers and technicians involved did even half of the steps required by the protocols, regulations and laws of the uniform and shipboard service. The catastrophic result was foreseeable even to an untrained civilian, if the few aboard had been asked their opinion.

It took less than two minutes for the oceanic alien to react but not the way they wanted.

The canisters were not motorized as they should have been so they slowed down to almost no forward vectoring barely three seconds after launch. Since the fuse perimeters were set by amateurs who were almost clueless as to how targeting a moving munition was done, the steel drums lit up, steaming out their blood-spoor bait-gas just as the SeaQuest was sailing right on top of them. This caused the entirety of the lower hull along decks E and D from the boat's ' _chin_ ' all the way to the end tip of dive plane 'D' to be coated in the lurid yellow fluorescent marking gas.

 **Oooopsssy… Misfire…**

At that point the giant lifeform decided that the SQ smelled good and tried to quickly move in to grab on for a nibble. At least, they hoped really, really hard it was hunger motivating the creature... The _other_ reason... Anyways... It grabbed around the left-side horizontal ' _arm_ ' that controlled lateral turns towards the left. Since its grip kept sliding on the bio-hull armor, the proto-leviathan let itself glide downwards and then managed to establish a better hold on the lower ' _arm_ ', the one that guided downwards movement. As the massive weight of the water-borne being settled on the dive-plane, it forcibly moved the mechanical limb out of position thus slowing the SeaQuest whilst also reorienting it in a downward course towards the deeper regions of the Tonga Trench.

 **" ! ! ! ALARM ! ! ! "**

 **"Rudder-B no longer responding!"**

 **"Hull integrity compromised on deck-C!"**

 **" ! ! ! ALARM ! ! ! "**

 **"Rudder-D no longer responding!"**

 **"Hull integrity compromised on deck-E!"**

 **" ! ! ! ALARM ! ! ! "**

The automated blaring of the computer's voice carried out to all zones and compartments of the ship, warning the inhabitants to bunker down and waterproof their shelters for the long run as they were going down to the darkest depths out of control.

In less than thirty seconds after initial contact, the UEO flagship had lost half its speed, most of its maneuverability and suffered grave mechanical damages to two of its rudders bad enough to require a drydock and open-hull work for about four months to repair everything back to combat-ready specs.

All that was before they even realized just how fast and deep they were going down into the Tonga Trench's deepest and least explored region, passed 20,000 feet under the waves.

 **Welcome to my not-so-dark domain**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Thursday 13th of February, 2020; 22:08pm**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-D, back-up command center**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

It was mass panic aboard the massive capital ship; civilians were bunkered down in offices and quarters shivering in fear while sailors tried to make haste toward the damaged zone to effect repairs but had to open then close every blast door manually along the way thus managing only a very moderate response speed. The people in the secondary bridge were flabbergasted at the turn of events, still trying to comprehend what happened that it all go so **WRONG** in such a spectacularly short time.

Thankfully, the command node doors were opened to let in a pair of sensor operators that would normally be off-shift; they had chosen to come offer their help rectify the situation. Just behind them came Manilow Crocker, huffing and puffing in exertion as he had run the way here as soon as the corridor had been opened up at length, and level enough for him to walk upright without face-planting into the deck-plates. The PAL system was blurting out the reports coming from decks C & E pell-mell as somehow the channels had gotten plexed instead of staying separate to keep the conversations logically segregated. The men below decks were screaming about hull breaches, flooded compartments and torn, ripped pieces of machinery that were bigger than a Ford Econoline that would need a pair of cranes and a forklift to move back to position without any guarantees they had any hopes of being functional again in this lifetime anyways.

Nobody in the secondary bridge who heard the incoming reports had any expectations of any repairs being sufficient to patch up this mess, even with a large amount of _Divine Providence_ and all of the Bush convoy's spare crew and equipment involved. Unless there were miracle workers aboard ( _oh yeah? You called?_ ) then nothing would be getting fixed quick before they reached drydock back at Pearl Harbor or New Cape Quest. And boy would that be a fun call to the admiral upstairs; the people could just picture the face the man would make when he heard how this SNAFU got done.

"What in tarnation happened?" general Lincoln's loud gravelly voice came from the corridor as he walked into the room, sliding in behind two more sailors coming to help with the electronics and navigational systems. A corpsman passed them by, holding on to one of the helmsmen who was thrown face-first into his steering yoke when the ship plunged. The poor guy had his nose broken and was now spreading blood all over the place as he was helped out the room since he walked more crookedly than if he were coming off a drunken bender.

Nathan Bridger passed a hand over his face in tiredness as he responded "It was my mistake. My tactical reflexes are rusty from prolonged disuse and the recent situations haven't helped me to keep a steady hand on the tiller." The old mariner carded a shaking hand through his short gray hair before continuing. "I ordered to shoot out the new bait-gas canisters but forgot to have the helm halt all movement first. Among many things I forgot to do... We shot the fake spoor but then plowed right through it, coating the ship's entire belly with it. The beastie sniffed us and went in for a bite. It grabbed, slipped, adjusted it's grip and in the process wrecked two of our dive planes. We are now at 90% of our maximal depth / pressure / currents tolerances, and also immobilized for the foreseeable future. At this point SeaQuest is practically rudderless since she can only turn right or go up at a weird angle with only sporadic balancing possible by filling or purging the ballast tanks. That would get done by eye and ear as the automated systems were knocked out." Bridger paused for a second to listen to the PAL chatter getting straightened out before completing his dreary explanation for the higher ranked officer. "Essentially general Lincoln, at this time if we try anything other than a straight-up ascension like an elevator cabin, we will probably get intimately acquainted with the cliff walls of the canyon."

The veteran auditor blinked twice as he mentally reviewed the answer then shrugged in absentminded determination to not get stuck on the nitty-gritty details of the mechanics and repairs. He had the technical skills of an untrained hamster; attempting to get involved with the geeks and pipe-monkeys would only end up with him looking like an idiot who kept the decent folk from their jobs. The base cause of the situation was self evident, not likely to reoccur, and he couldn't change the events in progress anyhow. While the old man did think this was exactly the type of mistake that should get a captain demoted or drummed out of the navy entirely, he was also willing to admit that the proto-leviathan hadn't been written about in the training and procedural manuals. In light of which, the captain probably had a good argument to defend his career with, if he wasn't already on his way out voluntarily to a _well protected_ pension.

Taking a deep steadying breath, the auditor nodded once and turned to the door, aiming to leave the area before another calamity befell them. "I will retire to my cabin to stay out of the way during the repairs. The crew are on edge enough without me stepping unduly on their toes. If you need help with admin like billeting the Bush's team or just lending a hand in the cafeteria, I'm willing and able."

Before anybody could answer the general, the sensor operator called out for attention from the senior officers to look at what he found outside. "Euh, sirs! You gotta see this! It's all glowing on the seafloor but we can't figure out what does it. I send the WSKR's down but the reading s are weird."

Up on the main monitor the image showed the bottom of the canyon peppered with phosphorescent spots shining up at them invitingly, as if they had just entered King Midas's vault to behold his many bejeweled splendors. The entire room became silent as they watched the almost stroboscopic effects of the millions of little sparkling lights until the ship shook and the probes showed the large organic entity pass under and beyond the ship in search of food or something else only its alien mind could know.

Captain Bridger made a wise decision at that point. "Keep focusing on the ship's life support systems, and then the ballast tanks controllers to insure we can raise to the surface. Anything glowing outside the view ports can take care of itself until our survival is guaranteed. I don't want even the HR Probe wasting time with this until it is certified we can go up unhindered. Clear to all?" he said while making eye contact with everybody in the command node.

Now insured the priorities were set, he told the L-C; "Hold the fort and keep us from sinking further. I'm heading to the tail of deck-C to see what happened to the rudder pistons and what exactly ripped off the hull that we have a breach that lets in the ocean. I will call you with my findings and repair estimates then go down to deck-E for the same overview. We will convene an officers' briefing after all that and have ourselves a light supper at the same time."

Without further delay, Nathan walked out the door, escorting the general until the staircase where they split off. He decided in fact to put the superior officer in charge of preparing the officer's mess, their common meal and contacting everybody so they could assemble in orderly fashion. On second thought, Bridger took up his PAL; he called Lucas to order him to work on the CPU core to ascertain their OS capacity. Given how the power kept fluctuating and the PAL's seemed all jumbled, he really needed to know quickly how much reliability their internal network still had at this point.

This was going to be a very long night indeed with little hope of sleep in view.

 **Dropped in the deep dark pit of despair**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Friday 14th of February, 2020; 24:11am (** _midnight_ **)**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-B, officers' mess**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

The room was giving off a claustrophobic feel despite the rich plush furniture and old-world style decorations. The stained glass lamps were just too subdued for an official meeting, the lack of light making the shadows deeper, darker and made reading data-pads or paper reports a pain. Lincoln could foresee an epidemic of headaches in the coming hours because of this setup. He would have to tell the engineering crew to install dimmer switches to power-up the existing lights and add new brackets with uncolored shades so the illumination spread around clearly for such events. Given the size of the crowd, it wasn't like they could jam them all into the ward room, although using the sea-deck could be looked at as an option in the near future.

About half the expected people were already arrived, most seated with their reports and tool belts at the tables they normally used with a few newbies sitting at the outer perimeter on the long benches where the galley's crewmen had installed small single-place folding tables to accommodate them. Several more lieutenants, ensigns and civilian technicians walked in over the next minutes, coming in just shy of the stated deadline at fifteen past midnight. The old general saw the door open for Bridger who walked in accompanied by a worn-out looking Hitchcock and visibly depressed Ex-O Ford that should have stayed in his bed like the medics told him to.

The captain sat at his table, spreading around the many data-pads and unrolled a set of paper blueprints he had pulled out of the safe in his cabin to write down his work notes as he inspected the damaged areas. Ford sat at his side as normal along Crocker, Shan and several lower officers. Hitchcock sat at her designated table with O'Neil, Ortiz, Krieg, and civilian technicians Lucas Wolenczak and Neil Weil. Doctor Westphalen sat at the medics' table with doctors Levine, Laszko, Sheridan, chief surgical nurse Dupré and pharmacologist Van Der Hoeven. About thirty more sailors and civies filled the rest of the room from all the engineering, technical and support departments until the late comers were obliged to stand in the doorways and near the bar.

Bridger stood from his chair, wrapping his knuckles on the table harshly to get everybody's attention. As he confirmed all eyes were on him. "Alright people, settle down! We have a long one in front of us before we can go get some sleep! The waiters will be passing around with trays of hand-food and pitchers of drinks. We'll get some folding tables placed for the standing-up crowd to put their stuff on since we expect this to take a little over an hour an a half before we're done. Give it a few minutes and we'll normalize the situation then proceed with the speaking out the actual nightmare."

After another ten minutes of hustling and bustling from the waitstaff, the captain told Lucas to activate the 3D simulation of the ship's hull. Not even bothering with a gesture of acknowledgment since he could tell just by the voices how close to the edge of breakdown the officers were, the teenager typed a few codes on is portable workstation. He ordered the principal server to link with all the peripherals inside the officers' mess whilst also slaving them to his custom management program to keep control of the spread of the classified informations. Once he had established dominion over the networked devices in the room, the adolescent pushed to them the web-based app to view the animated simulation then downloaded the plans. It took just ten minutes during which people were eating and drinking to get some desperately needed nutrition and energy to power through the mess.

 **It wasn't good.**

No matter what the officers said or tried, the reality was dreadful and getting worse by the minute. Two dive planes were hanging on to their sockets in the hull by the twisted gears and pistons that stuck in the other pieces of structural struts. Thankfully the girders and bulkheads had enough strength to not break and shear off the ship's main body or they would have a pair of Titanic-grade rents in the bio-hull armor that nothing they carried aboard would be able to seal. As it were, there were several compartments flooded with icy salt water into which they had already cut all electricity, plumbing and even the networks which meant no internal sensors, cameras or comms relays for the PAL's to connect.

The main engines themselves, mag-drives, fusion core, diesel motors, chemical batteries and reserves of spare fuel like diesel, natural gas and NitrOx for the shuttles were still above the ¾ mark so they had a nice safety net to rely on. As long as the fusion reactor and its associated subsystems worked, the whole ship could have fresh air, heat, plumbing and pressure in the hydraulic systems to run pneumatic power tools instead of using the electricity. Unfortunately, the mag-drive propulsion group was sapping almost 85% of their electrical output to keep the ship barely stationary against the harsh ceaseless currents at the bottom of the canyon or else they would get pushed, possibly crushed, against the cliff face.

As it stood, they already had asked the ship's population twice to shut off unnecessary devices, especially if they only served for leisure rather than survival or repairs. The principal computer core, secondary servers and the five comms nodes were usable and reliable but running under-powered to leave as much electricity for propulsion as they could reroute. As the techs realized the ventilation was currently straining to cool down the network hubs, they decided dialing back the speed of the servers was acceptable under the circumstances. As soon as the equilibrium was re-established in the power consumption across the remaining systems, they would slowly raise the processing level of the servers back to normal. The crew needed that precious electricity left in the wires for life support so most labs not associated directly with the infirmary and workshops building parts destined to immediate usage in damaged zones were shut down completely and converted as inert storage or lodging for the people they had no other place to locate.

 **They were crippled.**

The SeaQuest's ability to drive herself anywhere was shot to Hell. She would need to be towed or carried until she had been repaired enough to have mobile dive planes and a sound structure able to support the stresses and vibrations of high speed movement and deep depth dives. Even though the mag-drives themselves were just fine, the ballast tanks' electronic controllers were shot to the point the local boxes had burned out and needed replaced in totality, thus making keeping a level plane hard to accomplish at any speed. The actual electrical replacement job could only get done in a drydock as the ballast had to be emptied and the ship supported out of water before such work was done otherwise it wasn't safe to do.

All in all, they could **hopefully** get up to the surface _without critical mishaps_ but would never have any safe options to move the ship without external assistance from two capital ships at the least. Also, they presently had no idea for how long the ship could keep the integrity of the bio-hull and compartments that were still functional if they underwent a major change of speed, depth or lost the fusion core's electrical and steam output.

The only really good news the captain and senior officers had for the crew was that they had no deaths to deplore. By the luck of the gods, a few crewmen had suffered only some really bad injuries that would need a few weeks of hospitalization followed by two to four weeks of home convalescence to finish recovery but no mutilations or permanent handicapping to date.

The rest of the meeting was dedicated to planning the schedule for the critical watertight seals and checking the damned ' **hull siphons** ' since they still had them installed and ready to go. The few units in the flooded zones seemed to be pumping but as long as the rents were torn open, the action would be useless. Besides, they would not last for more than 24 hours then they would stop. They needed a way to close the structural gaps and then drain the compartments to keep them dry. Besides that, they needed to go forward in the canyon at very slow speed to find a place with less current in the hope they stop the strain on both the motors and the helmsmen. Eventually, it was admitted by common accord that the only viable solution left was to raise the ship and abandon her to the salvage teams that the UEO would send.

Once the repair teams' managers were named and the workshops' production schedules established, captain Bridger ordered everybody to make certain to respect the sleep periods they were assigned in their timetables. He also decreed that those officers that had been slotted for medically mandated days off or prolonged leaves of absence would now be put back on leave to spare their health from degrading further. They couldn't help the overall stress of the situation but they could try to not work them to death if it could be avoided. There were a few visible sighs of relief in the room at that order but mostly at this point the people were just resigned to the reality they faced.

 **Scraping the bottom of the barrel**

 _(SeaQuest – season 1 – opening theme)_

 **Monday 17th of February, 2020; 10:00am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, ward room**

 **North of the Australian coastline**

Nathan Bridger sat in his chair at the head of the table, backlit by the active monitor that showed the schematics of SeaQuest with colored zones indicating the state of damages and the level of repairs done to date. It was still mostly all red and yellow with precious little green or blue to be had. The officers assembled around the table were not even the regulars since half were relief personnel from the Bush or her escorts thus making the social climate in the room tend towards distant and chilly.

The last three days had been harrowing for the crew of the crippled ship. Firstly, it had taken almost 14 hours at a crawl to find a spot of the canyon where the currents and pressure were stable, if only for a few periods occasionally. It was still much better than the constant howling stream of the rushing torrent at the place they had arrived. Secondly, during the movement period the ship had shaken and vibrated so badly that several key repairs could not get done or the welds would have been crooked and the parts to attach would have been set in even worse than the welds. Add to that the feelings of uselessness suffered by about one full third of the people aboard as they saw their laboratories and workshops taken over for emergency production of parts or drafted as bunking dorms for the people from the Bush who were never supposed to sleep aboard.

The original setup was to ferry them by shuttle at each shift, which created its own set of problems for everybody. There was now almost 25% more people aboard than what the sanitation facilities had been designed for. The sewage reclamation systems would have been strained under normal situations but now with so much damage in the ship's tail and power fluctuations to boot... Well, lets just say that the drain pipes weren't always cooperating like they should. On top of that, these extra people needed to shower, find a change of clothes so they could wash the ones they had on their first shift aboard so the laundry hall was besieged to the point they had created a schedule and drafted non-critical scientists for a _laundry detail_ that way the machines were always used at maximum efficiency but without having hordes of people waiting around, clogging up the room.

The food reserves would hold them at full rations for another two months, which was just fine since Bridger intended to have them up and out of the ship by the end of the present week. No matter how emotionally attached he may be to the ship he designed, built and led on two different tours, she was now dying and there was no fiscally sound way to pay for the repairs needed to keep her afloat.

She would raise from the sea one final time to face the cutters' torches.

Taking his depressive thoughts away from the dreary future, the veteran mariner asked all the right questions and gave the polite reassuring answers. With a clear, limited path of success in front of them, it wasn't like they could have controversial debates in the room right now. Finally, Bridger gave a new order to the sensor crews.

"Okay, people. We've waited long enough as it is. On the next pass of the Hyper-Reality Probe outside the ship to evaluate the state of the hull, you will take the robot down to the canyon floor to gather samples of these shiny nodules or material, whatever it is. We'll have the science crew test it out and see what comes from it. At worse, it's an agglomeration of glowing algae or phosphorescent magnesiates of some sort, at best we could have discovered a new radiant element. Time and tests will tell. Dismissed."

 **Monday 17th of February, 2020; 10:00am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, sea-deck**

Doctor Kristen Westphalen was stressed for several reasons: the ship was crippled and slowly dying; the medical staff was hampered by systemic and structural problems; the moonpool had been chosen as the _ad hoc_ place of gathering for all those who had no jobs in the repairs but didn't want to simply vegetate alone in their room... Yes, the whole situation was not the most pleasant but like always in life, you find the illusive ' _silver lining_ ' hidden in the clouds and enjoy it while you can.

The mature female doctor stood besides the moonpool with her hands deeply in the pockets of her lab coat which she had buttoned up tightly over her sheep's wool turtleneck as the air was rather chilly around the ship for the last day. The engineering crew had realized that the ship was getting too warm quickly in several sections and the air filtration systems were straining with the volatile emanations caused by the higher temps. The captain had thus ordered to lower the ship-wide ambient temperature by fifteen degrees while drafting some unoccupied scientists to create chemical-based air filtration units that would be mobile and moved at need around those areas where the air recyclers were not sufficient.

She found his solutions were simple and quite functional, so she approved. It's just she was quite amused by the accidental result of people having a small cloud of condensed breath in front of them all the time from the chill which incidentally caused most to add a layer or two to their clothing choice else they freeze. On the flip side, the colder temps would in fact help with their breathing, stave off heat headaches and tame the nasty pervasive odors created by so many people and chemicals kept squeezed together inside such a small and limited vessel.

Kristen was dragged out of her introspective mood by the soft footsteps of her erstwhile colleague for the coming day; Lucas Wolenczak. Since the whole network was working on half capacity and their external links were not functional at this depth, she had asked the teenager to help with analyzing the samples of shining material brought back up from the trench floor. The teen had grumbled and tetched a bit under his breath, but mostly as a show of independence to remind her she wasn't the boss of him. Bribing him with cookies and warm tea had, of course, no bearing on his decision that she could in fact use the help of someone who actually had formal education in the ' _material sciences_ ' instead of the fluffy and squishy bio-stuff.

 **Snort! Boys of any age group and their pride!**

The motherly medic knew full well the depth of the sweet tooth inbred into any teenaged boy; given enough treats of various sorts, they all invariably became much more accommodating. She had experience from her childhood with her male cousins, her single late brother, three husbands and several class comrades during the university years. It was a well established and true fact that the best way to reason with a man was to feed him. Lucas had not proven any different to date, if only that he tended to grumble a bit at every step of the way towards admitting she was right. As the adult, she had to be in charge... Or, at least, look like it anyways. The boy had proven remarkably independent, autonomous and self-determined on all levels she could see. He was also quite reliable, efficient, hard working and focused on the goals, as long as they were his goals and his methods used. Otherwise...

And that aggressively defensive autonomy sounded alarm bells in her mind.

Even the most mature, reliable teenagers she had seen in her life had always had little quirks of character or benign flaws that were just amusing to poke fun at but left the door open, like a subconscious signal saying " _I still need parents_ ". Lucas, however, was closed off like an armored vault and more opaque than a swimming pool full of squid's ink inside a bank of London fog in the depths of an autumn rainfall. Trying to figure out anything about him was like trying to trepanate it out of him whilst he was awake and running away from you.

Hummm! She liked the young man just fine, really. He was actually easy to live and work with, not prone to angry fits or mood swings. It's just her _motherly instincts_ told her he needed help and protection in a bad way. And what she saw in the medical reports during the first week of the tour when she processed the crew's intake health evaluations...

At least Ensign Cy'Bella DiNavarro, one of their traumatology medics, had managed to develop a good, trusting relation with the teen. Goddess Morrighan knew he needed the support and the care for his injuries given how numerous and badly healed they were. Pulling herself back to the _here and now_ by force of will, Kristen gave the brooding boy a wide caring smile that made him purse his lips into a tight, almost invisible line as he worried about what she really wanted from him.

Then Kristen saw what he was wearing and erupted in full bellied laughter right at his face. The poor boy was wrapped up in many visible layers of a gray long sleeved turtleneck shirt he often wore with a short sleeved T-shirt on top covered by a blue & gray checkered buttoned flannel shirt and a short leather jacket that stopped above his belt-line. This was accompanied by two layers of mismatched socks inside his sneakers and an actual woolen tuque that had ear protection flaps complete with funny little tassel at the pointy end. She looked at him again and promptly lost all self control and bent over the nearest workbench to laugh out the mirth shaking her inside out.

Lips pursed even more so they looked like the rear hole of a chicken, face congested in a frown with his hands shoved deeply in his jacket pockets despite his thick leather gloves, he actually seemed about to throw a _bona fide_ fit of distemper when another loud explosion of humor had them both turn around.

Benjamin Krieg had walked into the sea-deck carrying the samples case from the HR Probe's parking silo and seen the teenager's getup. The man had been powerless to hold in the instant laughter at the sight; so many mismatched pieces of garment on so many layers gave the poor kid the appearance of a Peruvian wedding cake. He was a visually stunning display of coloration all thrown together for the biggest splash possible inside the smallest zone available. No wonder he was so tetchy about his looks.

With his nose in the air in a most magnificent sneer of superiority, the boy took the case from the counter where the lieutenant had unceremoniously dropped it to better hold his gut in laughter and left the sea-deck in huff of offended adolescent pride. Walking towards the enclosed lab reserved for doctor Westphalen, he mumbled nasty thoughts and not very polite imprecations all the way. The laughter escorted him until he used his foot to close the door behind himself.

 **Monday 17th of February, 2020; 10:37am**

 **SeaQuest DVS 6000, UEO flagship; deck-A, laboratory 'F'**

"I'm not talking to you." the terse warning came from the young male directly when Kristen opened the door to her second sanctuary after her cabin. She spent so much time here that she often wondered if she was in charge of medicine or science. No matter; she lived for both and medicine was science applied to its most important goal: improving the state of all living beings of the Earth, including those few people were aware of.

"I come bearing edibles, and warm tea, as promised." she answered gamely with a big smile while carrying the tray in a one-armed hold. Kristen crowded in near the boy's left side, waving her free hand over the steaming teapot's spout to waft the odor up to his face a bit more. Since he immediately turned his stool towards her to grab at the food, she gathered she had won this round, especially when he didn't turn away from her. Giving her a mock glare over the succulent cookie he was chomping through avidly, the youth nodded jerkily his head sideways to the table so she could see he had waited for her arrival to begin processing the specimen through the various tests needed.

Smiling gently at him in approval, she set the tray besides their workbench in a safe space then began setting out her own instruments with her favored set of dyes and reagents. As the mature doctor worked, she hummed an old Celtic tune from her family's long history. They had been founded by a couple of Germanic immigrants fleeing the Romans in the far past then added a colorful mix of local Angles and Saxons with Normans, Scotts, Irish and even an oddball Frankish male somewhere in the 1500's. It explained why the House name didn't sound very ' _English_ ' surprising most who heard it and her provenance from London's snobby side. She didn't care for that; she thought her family's wide, varied past made them interesting and a good subject of conversation at parties. As she hummed and placed her varied tools and bottles, she failed to see the changes on the boy's face as he thought about the music and its cultural roots as he was rather gifted musically, just as much as languages. At the same time, he was analyzing her tool setup and choice of chemicals with great attention. Some of liquids being placed on the bench had no place in modern chemistry or medicine. The conclusions he came to were a jarring revelation but he kept quiet. Unless the woman brought it up, he wouldn't broach the subject about her Faith or magical education and how she was cutting it close, being inside a ship saturated with so many cameras and remote surveillance like the SeaQuest.

Kristen smiled, pleasantly surprised that the teen took her prep time to set her cup, saucer and plate then served her some cookies and hot tea. He even remembered to add the dash of cream and squeeze of lemon she liked. If she had only the warm drink, she would have added honey too but the cookies she brought in were an old scottish recipe that already incorporated a lot of butter, brown sugar and were decorated with green mint icing. No need to sweeten the tea along that; her teeth would need an _enameling elixir_ if she wasn't reasonable!

The adolescent had opened the fixed terminal at his station to begin recording the data. He pointed to Kristen that he had already activated the automated detectors and contamination alarms in case they didn't themselves see the danger fast enough. With an approving nod, she typed her own codes to lock the lab during the testing phase. Since it was a ' _safe_ ' room, it had a small 3-piece bathroom and medical equipment in case the scientists accidentally uncovered or mixed something that could turn out contaminating or toxic.

Coaxing the grumbling boy, she managed to make him take off his leather jacket and gloves to change into an official lab coat and latex gloves. She didn't make him take off the ridiculously colored tuque simply because it looked so funny the way it clashed horrendously with his blond hair. Also, the psychedelic puffy tassel kept moving around as if it were animated to always point upwards no matter the position of his head. **Snort!** The dumpy little accessory made him look younger, happier, and far less old and worn out by ill health and anger than he actually was. As they got to the crux of the work after two long hours of meticulous preparations, Kristen was satisfied with her earlier conclusion: the more cookies Lucas ate, the less stressed, the more friendlier he became in their interactions.

Yes! Mother always knows best!

Blinking both eyes in disbelief, the boy asked incredulously "did you just dimple at me? I'm a quarter of your age, you remember that?" with an amused expression that took out any meanness from his perplexed question.

"I don't have any idea what you're speaking of." Kristen answered in a peppy tone as she wielded an electrical saw to slice another roundel of the solid cylindrical material. Then she froze hard and glared malevolently at the grinning teenager. "And for your education, _child_ , I am most certainly **NOT** 64 years old! Don't you know how to count? Didn't you obtain university qualifications in mathematics a few years ago, hemm? Another one of those ' _bonbon diplomas_ ' right? Just sign the check and walk out the door with it, no actual learning need happen, hein?" she came back at him testily. The smarmy little brat just sat there with a big self-satisfied smirk, regardless of her response. Oh, the little runt would get a newsflash today! She **WAS NOT** old! She had _barely_ 54 springs of _experience_. She most certainly wasn't some ' **golden age** ' tenured _biddy_ parked in a university's faculty Chair, resting on her laurels whilst waiting for retirement to finally be done with it all.

Oh, the _nerve_!

Thrusting the newly cut slice of glowing unidentified minerals at the boy, she imperiously pointed at the electron microscope, silently intimating him to get scanning instead of paying himself her head. Goddess, what she had to endure from him! Still smiling widely his shit-eating grin, Lucas began to hum his own tune, some pop theme from the 1990's she didn't recognize, as he loaded the sample slides into the vacuum chamber of the E-M for the tunnel-sight effect imaging. In no time, the comically mismatched colleagues had enough basic results to know what they faced.

"Well, doc, we really got flushed down the privy pipes this time!" the young man declared in a mocking _Olde English_ accent quite happily at the test data streaming in from the electron microscope, the mass spectrometer and the chromatograph while pouring them another round of warm courage. Reading the paper printout that aggregated the results in a more coherent fashion than the raw streams Lucas could decipher on the fly easily for reasons she couldn't divine, Kristen came to the conclusion that her lab partner was indeed correct. They had indubitably landed in the village moat, indeed.

As the mature woman frowned, wondering how to break the somewhat important but certainly not critical finding to the captain and senior officers, Lucas sidled up to her right and leaned in next to her ear with a suggestion. "What do you say I get one up on good ol'e Ben? I still owe him for that prank he pulled on me just before we left drydock in NCQ. It wouldn't hurt anybody. Well, nobody but Ben and he doesn't count as a ' _body_ ' until he's paid his debts..."

Gazing into the falsely innocent sparkling flint-blue eyes of the child she knew to be capable of gut churning violence ( _including disemboweling; ironic turn of thoughts, isn't it?_ ) and wondered if she really wanted to facilitate the little vandal in his acts of delinquency.

Lucas's PAL beeped, calling both their attention to the device in his flannel shirt's pocket. He took out the mobile and toggled the speaker, foregoing his usual wired earbud & HUD glasses combo. "Hey there, kid!" called out the aforementioned quartermaster "Will you join us for lunch or is the old gal so tired she's holding you back from working at your normal pace?" he asked, not knowing he was on speaker or that Westphalen was listening in.

The adolescent looked at Kristen with a very satisfied smirk as she stewed in her anger silently. Giving the boy a decisive nod, she washed her hands of it all; Krieg deserved this and more. Let him be the one to tell anybody outside the ship's council just how deep in shite they were.

"I'll be there in about a half hour, Ben. Just have to go to my cabin to fix something then I'll swing by the common cafeteria after. That okay?" the teen answered his supposed friend while winking at his accidental accomplice of the day.

And so the trap was set; vengeance would be served cold, abysmally cold indeed!


End file.
